Much like many artists in Vancouver, Takei has surrendered to a lifestyle of wearing many hats (or wigs) in order to survive, but this month they’ve been solely immersed in the rehearsal process of kinetic dance-theatre piece Tomboy.

A tale of transmasculine identity featuring time-travel, slavic vampires and warped Polish folk dance, Tomboy’s conception dates back to 2023.

“I’ve done three different workshops of Tomboy and now we’re moving towards the full production,” shares Takei. The cast has varied over the years with Takei being one of the key consistent players. They play the lead, Alex, a trans-masculine, non-binary historian who tumbles through a labyrinth of lifetime memories by way of distorted Polish dance sequences. 

Takei and Tomboy director Mateusz West met while studying theatre, finding a kinship in their exploration of queer, non-binary and normie-resistant approaches to creativity. “I thought theatre school was gonna be so gay, and this was over ten years ago, but it was not. Mateusz and I really saw each other.” After taking leave from capital-A-Acting to focus primarily on the stagelife of Rose Butch, Takei claims their return was thanks to West who invited them to work on a project in 2019 with frank theatre company, “Okay so he did kind of bring me back to acting. Amazing.”

Mateusz, who is of Polish descent, has cleverly infused Tomboy’s plot with a slash of Slavic folkloric horror. The Upior, known as a blood-feasting prototype of the Vampire, shows up as a symbol of internalized ancestral shame, violence and fear. Upiory are beings that roam both night and day, embodying challenging societal reflections of life and death. These multitudinous and hybridized figures are also representative of that which resides outside of the norm and which challenges rigid societal expectations of what beings can be. 

“Mateusz wrote a character that is really juicy and at different points in the show you see things from different perspectives and different realities.” One of these realities transpires during the early 2000s, where Alex is expressed as an awkward, outcast teen who believes their aspirations to embody masculinity are completely unattainable. They hit it off with an emo and fan fiction loving bad boy at Polish dance class, played by Calder White, who leads them into a world of darkness. “You see Alex struggle with that, but also get really seduced by it.”

For centuries of storytelling, horror has effectively translated experiences that are difficult to understand or explain, “I think people of gender-diverse experience can really relate to that which is feared and desired at the same time. Especially transmasculine people can be anxious about testosterone making them aggressive or angry, or someone they won’t recognize. When I started my medical transition I felt more calm, more centred. And what I saw in the mirror was absolutely something I recognized and wasn’t a scary stranger.” Much like the horror genre, dance can act as a moving metaphor, as a way of communicating experiences that can’t be described with words. Choreographer O Augustine has also been involved in the development of Tomboy since the beginning, working closely with the cast to blend traditional, rigid and gendered Polish Folk dance with contemporary dance abstraction.

Tomboy promises to be a complex, multidisciplinary theatre piece touching on themes of self-discovery, homophobia, memory, and trans joy.

Tomboy premieres during the second annual Warrior Festival March 4 to 8 at the Cultch Theatre. TICKETS & INFO.