Interdisciplinary artist Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野 knows what life is like on the road for opera singers. Nine years ago, Kasahara (they/he) was working under a singing contract in Germany, living out of a suitcase, going on auditions, and missing home in Toronto. In a Zoom interview, the trans nonbinary singer recalls asking themself: “Is this what the opera career is about? Just singing the same handful of roles over and over and over again?”
Kasahara wanted to break out of the box and escape being artistically pigeonholed. So, during a long break between performances, they joined the Emerging Creators Unit with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre to explore playwrighting. The result was a stunningly original solo show, The Queen In Me. It fleshes out the Queen of the Night character, who sings two arias in Amadeus Mozart’s famous opera The Magic Flute.
“We don’t really know much about her—why she’s there in the opera, why she has this ambition to retrieve back this seven-fold circle of the sun from Sarastro, and why she is depicted as being so evil,” Kasahara says. “The character doesn’t seem to have a lot of depth. And I wanted her to have depth.”
In stage productions, Kasahara notes that dialogue between the Queen of the Night and her daughter Pamina is often cut or drastically reduced. After performing this role, Kasahara started wondering what the Queen of the Night might be saying off-stage in the wings.
Teiya Kasahara speaks about creating The Queen In Me in this video.
Kasahara will perform The Queen In Me in Vancouver
All of this drove Kasahara to develop the character in The Queen In Me.
“She started to express herself and get her emotions out,” Kasahara reveals. “As that character was doing that, I realized she was also getting her frustrations out about different characters like her in the canon—and also for the sopranos who play her or characters like her. Then ultimately, I felt like she was starting to advocate for me, the opera singer who was playing her.”
In 2022, the Canadian Opera Company, Amplified Opera, Nightwood Theatre, and Theatre Gargantua co-produced the world premiere in Toronto of The Queen In Me, which was nominated for five Dora Mavor Moore Awards. Kasahara has since performed The Queen In Me accompanied by pianist David Eliakis in other venues in Canada and Europe.
On Friday (September 12) and Saturday (September 13), re:Naissance will present the Vancouver premiere. Both shows will be in the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at the SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 West Hastings Street).
Kasahara describes The Queen In Me as not only a love letter to great works of music, but a fight against inequities, unethical practices, and unfair expectations still upheld in opera.
“Enough of putting people in boxes and policing their gender and policing their human expression,” Kasahara declares. “So really, this character is driving to make this artform more inclusive and more celebratory for all people.”
Opera Canada honoured Kasahara with its Change Maker Ruby Award in 2025. Three years earlier, the Canada Council of the Arts awarded the interdisciplinary artist the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in music.
Kasahara loves singing in different languages
For Kasahara, performing The Queen In Me in Vancouver is something of a homecoming. Born in Ottawa and raised in Kelowna and Abbotsford, they performed a Nihon-buyō dance in a kimono and participated in judo demonstrations at Powell Street Festivals in their childhood. The interdisciplinary artist’s father was a first-generation Japanese immigrant and United Church minister who delivered sermons in Japanese in Surrey.
Kasahara studied classical piano but aspired to be in a rock band as a teenager. In pursuit of music education, they attended a vocal workshop at UBC at the age of 15.
“We stayed in residence there and we did many different activities,” Kasahara recalls. “One of them was we watched the Ingmar Bergman 1975 film version of The Magic Flute.”
The singing, cinematography, and fantastical story captivated the young sinter. Kasahara went on to study music at the University of British Columbia, focusing on opera.
“Nancy Hermiston was my voice teacher and I learned so much from her.”
At UBC, Kasahara also studied music theory under Bob Pritchard, Italian under Luisa Canuto, and German under Angelika Struch. Kasahara’s mom’s mother tongue was German.
“The canon is mostly in Italian, German, and French—and I love singing in different languages,” Kasahara states. “I think it adds another level of musicality.
“The brain has to kind of imprint whatever notes you’re learning—whatever emotion is behind it—through that language,” they continue. “And Italian is great because they have such great vowels for the vocal production.”
In this regard, Italian resembles Japanese, according to Kasahara.
Kasahara is also a graduate of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio. They were also an artist-in-residence for the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.
Understandably, Kasahara doesn’t want to give away too much of the storyline in The Queen In Me. But the creator acknowledges that this work is informed by their own journey around sexuality, gender, and returning to their Japanese Canadian heritage.
“I think that’s definitely reflected in the script, in the score, in the staging…and how I use the Queen of the Night’s body in the costume,” Kasahara says. “It’s all interconnected.”
Event details
re:Naissance will present The Queen In Me at 7:30 p.m. on Friday (September 12) and Saturday (September 13) in the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 West Hastings Street). Tickets are available through The Queen In Me website. There is free admission available to Indigenous, Inuit, and Métis people, and each show includes a Q&A with Teiya Kasahara.
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