Cross-gender acting is acting of the opposite gender. It is distinct from both transgender and cross-dressing roles.
Cross-gender acting often interacts with complex cultural ideas about gender. It has a diverse history across many cultures, including English Renaissance theatre, French theatre, Japanese theatre, Indian theatres, and Ethiopian theatre. In many contexts, such as English and Indian theatres, cross-gender acting was linked to the oppression of women. Many societies prohibited women from performing on stage, so boys and men took the female roles. Female impersonation often decreased in popularity as women gained this right.
Female cross-cast roles are commonly young boy characters, or, in the case of theatre companies like the Takarazuka Revue Company, male heroes. Some cultures, like Tang and Yuan dynasty China, had traditions of cross-gender acting for both men and women concurrently. Modern American cross-gender acting, especially in musical theatre roles where men play women, is often employed for comedic effect.
Traditions of cross-gender acting before the 19th century Ancient Greece During the early development of ancient Greek theatre in the sixth century BC, both Athenian women and men performed. By the fifth century, changing Athenian cultural codes excluded women from public life, and thus the theatre. After this point, men played both male and female roles.
English Renaissance theatre
In Renaissance England, women were forbidden from performing on stage, so female roles in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were originally played by cross-dressing men or boys. (See also Stage Beauty.) Therefore, the original productions of the above-mentioned Shakespeare plays actually involved double-cross-dressing: male actors playing female characters disguising themselves as males. Academic research into the contemporary attitudes towards the practise have yielded a variety of interpretations. Historian Laura Levine argues that "an all-male acting troupe was the natural and unremarkable product of a culture whose conception of gender was "teleologically male".
Gender distinction and cross-gender acting Cross-gender acting, while not specifically making a statement about crossdressing, helped produce negative judgements and statements about those who did cross-dress in the Renaissance era. In order to maintain a hierarchy and a gendered division of labour, a prominent feature of the Renaissance era, women and men needed to be distinct. Cross-gender acting disrupted gender distinction. Male-to-female cross-gender actors were either viewed as shameful, or they gained wealth and social status when playing women who married well-off men. In instances where boys acted as women, it was because they were seen as objects of desire, much like women, and they were also in a subordinate position in the hierarchy scale.
Some instances of female-to-male cross-dressing in theatre allowed women to challenge patriarchal notions of gender and explore both masculinity and femininity within this hierarchy. In The Roaring Girl, the protagonist, Moll, cross-dresses for liberty rather than safety, and thus exists in both male and female spaces.
Desire, homosexuality, and the malleability of gender for Renaissance MTF and boy actors In order to believably portray women onstage, male actors needed the audience to believe that the characters were truly female, meaning MTF actors needed the audience to desire them. Once male actors stepped into the roles of women, it was feared that they would adopt transgressive feminine traits, which led to the belief that crossdressing was an undisciplined act. While troubling to some, the idea of female impersonation proved that gender was malleable when it came to England in the Renaissance Era. Theatre was considered a more acceptable venue for crossdressing, chiefly because it confined the act to a distinct place.
When boy actors portrayed female characters, religious authorities feared that the boys would become the women they embodied in plays, and therefore would transform into objects of erotic thoughts for male spectators. This sense of desire would supposedly come from the boys' failed attempts to represent binary womanhood onstage. The female costume on a boy's body created a sense of confusion between knowledge and visibility; it was thought that this confusion forced male spectators to translate women's appearances to the bodies of boys.
Shakespeare has been criticized for inciting male spectator desire on boy-to-female characters in his plays such as As You Like It, where boys played highly sexualized female characters.
Chinese theatre In Chinese opera specialized male actors who play female roles (dàn) are referred to as nándàn (男旦); the practice arose during the Qing dynasty due to imperial prohibitions against women performing on stage, considered detrimental to public morality.
Going back as far as the Tang dynasty, both men and women played roles of the opposite sex in theatre. For women in the Yuan dynasty, cross-gender acting was liberating, as playing men allowed to embark on scholarly pursuits typically restricted from women. Despite this partial liberty, female actors were treated like prostitutes. During the Qing dynasty, women were prohibited from performing at all due to imperial anxieties about female sexuality. This led to the development of female impersonation techniques such as cai ciao (false-foot skill), which simulated a woman's bound feet.
Japanese theatre
Japanese kabuki theatre began in the 17th century with all-female troupes performing both male and female roles. In 1629 the disrepute of kabuki performances (or of their audiences) led to the banning of women from the stage, but kabuki's great popularity inspired the formation of all-male troupes to carry on the theatrical genre. In kabuki, the portrayal of female characters by men is known as onnagata. The practice is detailed in a story of the same name by the Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima. All roles in Noh dramas are traditionally played by male actors; actors playing female roles wear feminine costumes and female-featured masks.
Spanish theatre Cross-dressing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain was frequent among actors, and the theater was at the time the most popular form of entertainment. There was a fascination with female cross-dressers particularly (women dressed as men), who were "extremely popular" in the "Golden Age Comedia". Male actors might play the "women dressed as men" parts. Spain eventually found this cross-dressing to be threatening to social order, and passed laws targeting female transvestites throughout the 1600s. Despite the negative reactions and disapproval, it continued to remain very popular in the comedia.
French theatre
Much like England, France also had a tradition of cross-casting, but by the second half of the 17th century these roles had dwindled. They existed in unique forms during the reign of Louis XIV however—mainly in comedy, school drama, ballet, and opera. By the mid-sixteenth century, female actors in France became more and more common, but they were selective in the roles they wished to play. French female actors did not want to play unglamourous or "ugly" women, so these roles were often cross-cast. One example of this is the nourrice, or "nurse" archetype—a male-acted older, humorous, post-menopausal woman whose undesirability contrasted the primary female roles played by women.
In the Ballet de cour tradition, men often played women. Famously, King Louis XIV performed in many such roles. For Louis XIV, cross-dressing in a theatre context was not satirical but rather a show of power. When performing, these men dressed in distinct costumes. They wore skirts, but their hemlines rose above the knee, displaying their thighs in a style that would have been prohibited for women but was permitted for men. This placed these roles in a third category that was neither man nor woman precisely.
19th- and 20th-century cross-gender acting
American and European theatre, operas, plays, ballets and pantomime A travesti is a theatrical term referring to the portrayal of a character in an opera, play, or ballet by a performer of the opposite sex. More specifically, a theatrical or operatic role in which an actress appears in male clothing is called a "breeches role" ("pants role" or "trouser role"), and roles once performed by a male soprano castrato may instead be performed by a female mezzo-soprano or contralto.
In the late 19th century, one of the most famous actresses was Vesta Tilley, who worked in a music hall from age five well into her fifties. In the late 1890s, she was the highest paid woman in Britain. What made her so famous was her tendency to dress as a man and act out "masculine" scenes and roles.Steinbach, Susie L. . Understanding the Victorians. London: Routledge, 2012. 192-193. Print. Centuries before, Julie d'Aubigny, aka "La Maupin" (1670–1707), had also been famous for her breeches roles.
In 1904, Nina Boucicault originated the theatrical tradition of cross-sex casting for Peter Pan, continued thereafter by Maude Adams, Marilyn Miller, Eva Le Gallienne, Sandy Duncan, and Cathy Rigby, among others.Pilkington, Angel M. "Peter Pan: Myth and Fantasy", Midsummer Magazine, 2000, reprinted at the Utah Shakespearean Festival website, 2007 In 1954 Mary Martin portrayed the title character in the musical Peter Pan. "The boy who would never grow up" is a classic trouser role, as is Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro (by Beaumarchais).
In pantomime plays that are traditionally adaptations of fairy tales and performed around Christmastide, the role of lead male was once commonly played by a principal boy—a young, attractive, female. This practise has fallen out of favour recently, with popular male television and pop stars taking these roles. Conversely, the role of a pantomime dame, a middle aged woman played by a man in drag for comic relief, is still one of the mainstays of panto.
Similarly, Georgy Millyar played a role of Baba Yaga, an ugly old woman with supernatural abilities in a dozen of films, including Vasilisa the Beautiful (1940) and Jack Frost (1964). He used to say that an actress does not ever allow anyone to make her that ugly, while he does.Актеры советского и российского кино (Actors of Soviet and Russian cinema) (in Russian) http://rusactors.ru/m/millyar/
French salon theatre Into the 19th and 20th centuries, French anthropologist Jane Dieulafoy and her husband Marcel hosted private salons where they staged classical plays. The genders of the characters stayed true to the original texts, but the actors were cast blindly with no regard for gender.
Chinese theatre After the May Fourth Movement in the 1910s, women were once again permitted to perform in China, and both men and women were cast true to their gender.
Many of the characters in Chinese Opera were performed by men; they cross-dressed to play the roles of women. A famous cross-dressing opera singer is Mei Lanfang.