In ‘Human Measure,’ multimedia artist Cassils and choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque explore the tension between trans visibility and civil rights

“Human Measure,” the new dance piece created by multimedia artist Cassils and choreographed by Jasmine Albuquerque, problematizes visibility.

Performed by Cassils, along with five other trans and non-binary artists, the work comes as trans individuals are more visible than ever in the arts and media. Yet at the same time, LGBTQ communities — particularly trans individuals — around the world are seeing their rights rolled back at unprecedented rates.

It raises the question: does visibility necessarily equate to civil rights? It’s an idea Cassils has explored for six years as they’ve developed “Human Measure.” Toronto audiences will confront the question when the piece is presented at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre from Thursday to Saturday.

“We’re told visibility equates civil rights, that with Laverne Cox on the cover of Time Magazine (the first transgender person to be featured in 2014) now we’ve made it. But that’s not the case in terms of lived experience. And so the work is very much problematizing visibility,” said Cassils, who was born in Canada but now lives in Los Angeles.

“As a trans person living in the United States, we’re in a moment of increased violence … in a society which is actively passing legislation that is trying to erase the very existence of your being.”

“Human Measure” explores this tension through striking visuals and movement, which examine the notion of visibility through dance and photography. The contemporary dance piece, which was originally developed at the Banff Centre and premiered in Manchester last fall, transforms the theatre into an analogue dark room — with nothing more than red safety lights illuminating the performance space.

The six performers, almost completely naked, develop a cyanotype (an archaic photographic printing process using ultraviolet light) in real time. At the end of the performance, they hoist the cyanotype above the stage, revealing the outlines of their bodies captured on the canvas.

There are sequences in the work, Albuquerque said, which have become especially poignant and speak directly to the experiences of some trans audience members.

“There’s a moment where we have this line of dancers walking through and each dancer has a moment to scream, whisper or say something, but they’re being washed out by this line of people trying to silence them,” she said. “It’s a very symbolic moment of how trans people are being silenced and society is taking their voices out.”

While their identity and the identities of the other performers certainly inform the work, and that is the lens through which audiences will likely examine the piece, Cassils hopes spectators “look at it in terms of its imagination, and its investigations and developments of visual and performing arts.”

Cassils, who trained as a painter but has worked in live performance, sculpting and film, said “Human Measures” is a reinterpretation of French artist Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries,” a series of works that used naked women as “human paintbrushes” to create paintings in a performance setting, in which Klein acted as the director.

Klein’s work has since been criticized as being exploitative in the way he used women’s naked bodies for his art. While acknowledging the works’ issues, Cassils wanted to reclaim Klein’s use of bodies and reframe it through the lens of trans bodies and experiences. Instead of the performers being in a passive state, directed by the creator, Cassils and Albuquerque delved into the idea of “empowered labour”: the idea of coming together and creating the piece collectively.

Cassils’ initial idea for the piece came from an unlikely source. “I worked as a personal trainer for 23 years,” they explained. “As I peeled these sweaty gym mats off the floor at the end of the session, I would see my clients’ bodies, outlined in sweat, with perfect imprints of their shoulder blades and hair follicles all on this generic blue mat. And to me, it looked like a Yves Klein painting.”

For Cassils, whose work has toured globally and garnered international recognition for the way it investigates LGBTQ histories and representation, all art is political. “There’s no such thing as unpolitical art. To take a posture that art isn’t political is indeed itself a political posture,” they said.

Their previous projects include “Pissed,” in which Cassils collected their urine for 200 days and created an art installation to protest the erosion of washroom access for transgender students under the Trump administration. In their performance piece “Inextinguishable Fire,” Cassils set themselves on fire and forced audiences to confront violence and trauma on the stage as a metaphor for real-world atrocities.

But of all their projects, they said “Human Measure” is unique in the way it represents trans stories onstage.

“In my early work, I was one of a few trans artists that were given a platform. And so my job in many ways was burdened with the mantle of representation,” said Cassils. “And so what’s beautiful with this piece is there are so many people involved — there are 60 trans and non-binary folks — so it’s offering a variety and complexity of lived experience that goes far beyond my own experience. It’s a refusal of a single narrative.”

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