In a world that values definitives and absolutes, Gender Euphoria celebrates the vulnerable, the in-betweens, the acts of delicate transformation, where transitioning is a constant state of affairs.

Since I first heard it at Monash University nearly a decade ago, Mama Alto’s voice has developed, gaining richness, colour, and power. Her onstage presence has matured too, from a brittle defiance to a generous, graceful authority. As soon as she steps onstage, draped in a trans flag encrusted with rhinestones, the audience is with her. She performed with Taylor Mac two years ago in A 24 Decade History of Popular Music and she has adopted one of Taylor’s best qualities: a way of looking at fellow performers as though they are the most beautiful person in the world. She endows her community with love. When she looks at people, she shines. The audience, washed with light from the stage, beams back. And her voice, when she rockets up an octave in The Pretenders’ I’ll Stand By You, sends goosebumps through my whole body. My friend lets out a strangled whoop that contains both the desire to cheer and the urge to maintain the pin-drop silence in the room.

Mama Alto in Gender Euphoria (photograph by Alexis Desaulniers-Lea Photography)

The codes of the theatre become deeply embedded in the onstage content. The costuming and glitz of drag, the gold and satin and sequins, are a form of glamour, a sort of magic, a rapturous visual spectacle. The layout of the Spiegeltent means that when the sidelights snap on through the smoke-machine haze, performers are haloed, mysterious, and beautiful. The theatre is a space that sets its own rules; wearing a crown makes the performer a king. For Gender Euphoria, the performativity of gender is endowed with the same magical ruleset. When I wear this dress, it says, I am a woman. And when I tell you that I am magic, I am.

It is also a space where performers can take charge of the ways in which they are observed. Semiotician Daniel Chandler writes about the codes of looking in Western culture, where staring is deeply invasive. The stage is a space that actively solicits the gaze, that offers a place for prolonged looking. And, importantly, it is a looking that is on the performer’s terms. To stand onstage is a way of occupying space, of inviting a gaze that is longer than a sideways glance, saying, we are here. The longer you look, the more you will see.

Gender Euphoria is, as Mama Alto tells us with delight, the largest trans and gender-diverse cast ever assembled in Australia. It is also cross-generational and intersectional, introducing its audience to each performer with a sense of wonder: gender diversity can look like this, and this, and this! Tiwi Islander Crystal Love lipsynchs to Beyonce’s I Was Here, the lyrics becoming a defiant claiming of First Nations sovereignty to land and to Sistagirl identity. Amao Leota Lu performs traditional dance in a day-glo costume, fusing Samoan Fa’afafine tradition with 1990s rave.

The format of Gender Euphoria is familiar to festival audiences. With its rotating songs, storytelling, and circus acts, its structure mimics the slick, large-scale touring burlesque revues that dominate the global Fringe circuit. But Gender Euphoria’s point of difference lies in its vulnerabilities, in the cracks in the façade. The production becomes a celebration of the unfinished and uncertain. When Quinn Eades holds Mahla Bird on his shoulders during a tender monologue about his first injection of testoterone, he shakes with the effort. Singing Anaïs Mitchell’s Coming Down, his voice is tentative, ragged. Pianist Ned Dixon supports him with quiet harmonies until the final verse, when Eades sings unamplified and alone, as Bird slides head-first towards the floor from a rope in the centre of the stage. It is a moment of profound delicacy and feeling.

Harvey Zielinksi appears onstage in a boxing kit, robe open, exposing the fading lines of top surgery scars. He delivers a monologue about boxing and passing as male and longing to play Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’ glittering, devastated heroine. The rhythm of the text is punctuated by volleys of air punches. With each right cross, the collar of Zielinski’s robe shears across his microphone. The sound is strangely fleshy, creating a tension between the visual fight against nothing and an auditory battle against flesh. It’s not intentional, but like much in the performance, its beauty lies in the unanticipated and provisional. Zielinski’s fragmented monologue, in particular, feels like the kernel of a longer work itching to get out.

The spoken-word pieces in Gender Euphoria are particularly effective in their articulation of the joyous, wondrous possibilities of gender nonconformity. Pain and trauma exist here, acknowledged and respected, but the focus is on the future, on hope and acceptance and a dream of a better world. ‘The most revolutionary thing we can do,’ says Mama Alto, ‘is to let ourselves love ourselves.’ This self-love manifests in the wonder of becoming – the way the body changes as a text and is read differently by both society and by its owner. Fury describes trans people as ‘the living embodiment of change’, individuals who embrace the unknown and meet an ever-shifting world with an ever-shifting self.

Nevo Zisin in Gender Euphoria (photograph by Alexis Desaulniers Lea Photography)

Nevo Zisin walks through the crowd, announcing themselves as a ‘gender whisperer’. They lock eyes with audience members as they say, ‘You are magic. You are loved. You are not alone.’ A soft sigh ripples through the crowd, a testament to the power of acts of kindness, grace, and radical seeing. Nikki Viveca describes being a child in rural Queensland, where the gender binary was one of the fundamental laws of the universe. ‘And I had broken it,’ she says. ‘What other laws could I break?’ The idea of transness as a form of magic becomes deeply located in bodies that break societal laws, that become subject to alchemical changes through medical interventions and quantum shifts in selfhood. The self between genders becomes a subject in flux, revelling in the unfixed nature of identity and the possibilities of freedom from all manner of social laws.

When Mahla Bird performs a trapeze act at the culmination of the show, the audience is directed to don glasses that shatter light into colours. It is the perfect visual metaphor for the production. Bird’s body becomes multiple, shimmering; many selves turning in the air, surrounded by rainbow light. Gender Euphoria revels in this multiplicity, creating a space of joyous possibility and radical hope.

Gender Euphoria is being performed from 15 to 20 October at Arts Centre Melbourne as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.