After a successful Baroque Opera call-back in Fall 2023, singing Jupiter’s Act II aria “I must with speed amuse her”, I was cast as one of the Jupiters for the production of Opera McGill’s Semele which would be mounted later that academic year. It felt like a long way off, in some distant future. There was an entire Montreal winter, several opera productions, a packed season of choral gigs and two high-stakes competitions between the moment of casting and performing the role, not to mention completing the remainder of my Master’s degree. A lot could change, and it did. Three “hurdles” presented themselves to me in the preparation of the role of Jupiter as I neared the production period.

One such hurdle was another vocal “growth spurt”, as could be expected in a higher education setting, with weekly lessons, coachings and rehearsals fostering vocal and artistic development. I was excited about this technical growth. I leaned into it. I looked into “bigger” repertoire, including some stuff I had (perhaps foolishly) looked into some 5 years previously. By the time I came to learn Jupiter, a role I had been preparing for mentally, and looking forward to for some time, I found it difficult to approach. The role requires a level of vocal agility which I had lost touch with and, typically for Baroque opera, it requires a lighter approach. While it didn’t take long for me to adapt and incorporate the agility into my growing voice, the light approach continued to evade me. I believe this to be an issue often experienced by emerging artists. There is a juxtaposition, even a dissonance, between certain technical developments in the voice, and their healthy application to the repertoire we sing. As we continually learn about our personal, vocal and artistic identities, we dance to acclimatise to our growth and its relation to the repertoire we have taken on.

I was ready to dive headfirst into the next exciting challenge to my preparation for Semele: ornamentation. A topic of some contention in the opera community, there are disparate views as to how much, when and how to ornament in Baroque opera. These differing opinions cloud young singers’ approach to Handel’s vocal works for instance. Nevertheless, as a pianistically-minded singer, with dedicated training in ornamenting Handel, I felt prepared for the task. I anticipated making dramatically-influenced, musically innovative, historically-informed decisions in my embellishment of Jupiter’s music. My choices were not to everyone’s tastes stylistically. However, my coaches, diction coach Elizabeth Koch, my teacher John Mac Master, conductor Dorian Bandy and director David Lefkowich all appreciated the thought I had taken to make individualistic and informed choices. I personally find this process to be a creatively and personally fulfilling way to engage with and familiarise oneself with the musical text.

The final hurdle (and it was a biggie) to bringing Jupiter to the stage was the idea of gender that the cast and team were bringing to the world of Semele. There had been an idea floating around the McGill bubble since auditions about how the Gods in Semele would be distinct from the mortals in many ways, including their rejection of human social constructs surrounding such issues as gender. As we approached the rehearsal process, I had all but forgotten about this concept. David began to encourage the cast to think about the facets of our characters as an extension of, or drawing from, our own personal experiences. This particularly involved discerning our characters’ feelings, motivations and actions from scene to scene, their identities and their arcs throughout the opera. It became a holistic and artist-centric staging process, which I eventually came to enjoy greatly.

However, it was not without struggles. I was in a somewhat uniquely problematic scenario when it came to reconciling the gender of myself and my character. A lot of the feelings, motivations and actions of Jupiter felt remarkably gendered. As I stood in the first staging rehearsal, obsessing over how male Jupiter felt, I wanted to cry, to scream, to run away. These feelings were eating away at the protections I had built around myself to ward off my gender dysphoria when playing a male role. I quickly opened up to my castmates and David about the discomfort I was feeling about bringing material from my own life into this character. Jupiter felt imbued with a sense of male entitlement and privilege which I vehemently reject in my own life. My colleagues rallied around me, reassured me that I could do this and successfully translate myself into this character. But it wasn’t enough.

The whole year, without thinking, we had been collectively conceiving of Jupiter as a male god, existing in a male-dominated kingdom. When we assign gender to a figure as a community, there is a paradigm of gendered thoughts which surround this figure, which we all take on subconsciously. This is not to mention the practical applications of assigning gender to a figure, such as language used to refer to them.

Being asked to apply gendered aspects of my own life to a male character posed a dissonance which I found difficult to overcome. Bringing a feminine physicality, sexuality, rage, power etc. to a character that had been perceived and conceived of as male, transported me to the beginning of my transition, misunderstood, confused, and trying to imagine a whole person that aligned more with my truth, but who was so far from who I had been until that moment. It brought early-transition dysphoria back to the forefront of my daily life, and I found it difficult being in the room while we were still unsure of how my Jupiter would look, sound, feel, move.

Gradually, as I shared more about how I felt in the room, and identified the block between me and my character, I began to allow more of myself to come out in my interpretation of Jupiter. It began vulnerably, and not without tension, but I began to feel freer and freer to play and experiment with this new characterisation. Jupiter became a powerful, strong, sexy, matriarchal Goddess before I knew it. She was naturally sensual, impulsive, and caring in her relationship with Semele. My scene partner Kathryn Riopel and I discussed how to render our on-stage love credible, how to make the stakes of this relationship clear to an audience. For Jupiter this manifested itself in a slight libretto change. While all the other characters, who don’t know Jupiter truly, would refer to her as “he/him” and view her as a male figure, Semele understood Jupiter’s true self (despite never having seen her “God” form), and used feminine pronouns to refer to her. Jupiter’s motivation to keep Semele in her life was elucidated. Our scenes together were imbued with a great, desperate passion. It was an exciting atmosphere to play in. Furthermore, it was refreshing to display feminine sexuality on stage and feel that it came from a mutual place, rather what I am frequently faced with in opera: performing male sexuality which dominates the woman.

The thing which often brings my characters fully to life is seeing myself in hair, makeup and costume. Discussions around gender altered the concepts of the amazing team of Florence Cornet and Ginette Grenier, Opera McGill’s makeup and costume designers respectively. They introduced extreme feminine aspects to my Jupiter, emphasising her royal stature, and allowing the curves of my body to be seen, giving her a crown-like mane of hair, and exaggerated, almost drag-like facial features. I have often considered myself an “outside-in” actor. I’m able to feel how a character will feel and imagine how a character will look onstage, but I have a hard time solidifying this until I see myself in the mirror at dress rehearsal. For Semele, the costuming was a perfect marriage with the vision I had been crafting for Jupiter’s character through this rollercoaster of a rehearsal period. Jupiter was stage-ready with her Barbarella-esque hair, the royal reds and golds of her robes, and the fiercest face, fit for a goddess.

I gave two of the most convincing performances of my life as Jupiter. I left the process feeling satisfied artistically and musically, and very proud of my achievements, especially in overcoming the tumultuous feelings of dysphoria which presented themselves during dramaturgical discussions in the early days of staging. I was grateful for how David and my castmates employed patience, understanding and openness in rehearsals as I expressed the difficulties I was facing. This process reminded me of the beautiful sense of community that can be built in an opera studio. I want to see this level of open communication in every rehearsal space. The operas we put up on stage can be so challenging, emotionally and mentally for us artists. It is important to allow difficult feelings to come up and be dealt with efficiently, lest we allow them to toxify our lives from the inside out.