'The Body Politic': UNCSA Alumni Use Opera To Fight HB2

Two UNC School of the Arts alumni are using art to spark dialogue over House Bill 2. Their new opera on transgender discrimination, The Body Politic, comes to Raleigh Thursday for a performance in the Legislative Building Auditorium.

It follows the experience of a transgender Afghan immigrant to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his identity collides with the body politics of his friends and family. 

Composer Leo Hurley and his artistic collaborator, Charles Osborne, spoke with WFDD's David Ford about the new work shortly after its premiere in Boston. 

Osborne says the opera began in his mind about eight years ago after reading Ovid's ancient mythological narrative Metamorphoses. In it, a young girl, Iphis, is raised as a boy, and eventually transformed into one permanently by the god Isis. After trying to flesh that story out in his mind as an opera, Osborne came to the realization that he would need to update it to modern times, but he says he didn't yet realize that there were modern examples of the ancient myth playing out every day thousands of miles away in Afghanistan. 

In Afghanistan, the birth of a son is cause for celebration while a newborn daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated as “dressed up like a boy”) is a girl who is temporarily raised and presented as a boy." I didn't know of a scenario at that time where young girl[s], because of the economic situation of the family, were forced to be raised as boys, until I discovered the tradition of the bacha posh about three years ago through the book The Underground Girls of Kabul," says Osborne.

Hurley says that shortly thereafter he was approached by the Juventas New Music Ensemble and commissioned to compose a new work on a transgender theme. He soon approached Charles Osborne with his idea of an opera character who was both bacha posh and transgender. 

Osborne liked the idea, but took it a step further.

Osborne says the goal is to see what we can learn about ourselves by looking at a very different society and looking at our own. He adds that years of research in both the trans and Afghan communities has taught him and Hurley that we are all one race with the same wants and needs.

"I came back to him with a question. What if this transgender bacha posh had the opportunity to come to America? What does that say about our own culture? What does that say about our own gender politics? What can we learn about coexisting in the same space when we put a transgender Afghan refugee in the home of a conservative war widow, in the home of a southern drag queen, with the war widow's cisgender son, and then the Afghan mother back home is fighting for women's rights post-Taliban?"

"You know, our cultures and our customs may distinguish us, but it is only our prejudices that divide," says Osborne.

The original production plan for The Body Politic was to premiere the work in Boston and move it immediately to New York. But, shortly before the opening, and just three days after reading about the North Carolina General Assembly's passage of House Bill 2, Osborne and Hurley began reconsidering the run.

Osborne, who is a native North Carolinian, says "We wanted to bring together people from different sides, conservative and liberal, Christian and Muslim, cisgender and transgender, and to listen to one another and learn. And we were like, 'If that's our goal, we should do it. And we should do it where it matters most. New York doesn't need another transgender story. Maybe North Carolina does.'"

Osborne and Hurley have sent personal invitations to all 170 North Carolina General Assembly members and Governor Pat McCrory. As of Tuesday, four State Senators and two House Representatives have indicated that they will attend Thursday night's performance.