Ari Agha: Key of T

Key of T is a 60-minute audience co-created music/theatre performance based on transgender singer Ari Agha’s singing voice transition with testosterone. Ari (they/them) is the creator and star, Mackenzie Lyn Marr (she/her) is the co-performer/pianist, and Robert Farid Karimi (he/they) directs. Ari uses their experience of transgender voice change to guide the audience in exploring genderful freedom. The audience becomes the Key of T Choir, co-creating the show, building community, and spurring resistance!

The first song Ari and the audience sing together, less than five minutes into the show, is “Thank You For Being a Friend” from The Golden Girls. Singing together practices making sounds outside the restrictive rules of the gender binary, pushing the boundaries of how we’re “supposed” to sound. As a deeply embodied practice, group singing also builds intimacy and solidarity. By featuring Ari’s joy in singing-while-trans and community joy in singing queerly together, the show transgressively features unapologetic queer joy!

Ari creatively interweaves storytelling with collective singing. For example, Ari sings and teaches the choir/audience a Hungarian folk song. The song connects Ari’s mother’s childhood flight from Soviet Hungary, Ari’s tenuous connection to their Hungarian heritage, and their decision to take testosterone. Across contexts, singing in the Key of T means “being scared, but continuing to sing anyway.” In another scene, Ari describes the first time they told someone they were thinking of taking testosterone. This happened at the now shuttered, iconic DC lesbian bar, The Phase. Later, the Key of T choir/audience learns the chorus to “Ossify,” a song commissioned for the show with lyrics by Ari. The term “ossify” symbolizes Ari’s fears about taking T, and the choir/audience sing it throughout the story/song. An archival recording of this scene is included in “Work Samples.”

The show includes a soundscape by sonic artist Melike Ceylan (she/her) comprised of recordings of Ari singing “Simple Gifts” (by Joseph Brackett) over the course of their gender transition, artistically sharing changes in pitch, resonance, and timbre of Ari’s changing voice. The performance returns to this song with the choir/audience singing it in a story where a child’s drawing captures and reflects Ari’s true, genderqueer self. An archival recording of this scene, “Halo Child,” is also included in “Work Samples.”

Ari created Key of T because they were frustrated by the lack of information about how testosterone impacts singing for trans folx, and Key of T continues to be a site of community building and resistance. Because the show is co-created with the audience, it varies with every performance. What is consistent, though, is that the shared vulnerability of creating something together inspires intimacy, trust, and joy! Key of T responds to real world violent trans-antagonism and growing fascism, with unapologetic trans joy and singing. In the show, members of the Key of T choir/audience create and experience the world we want to live in, and carry that out of the art world into the real world.

Runtime: 1 hour

Ages: Ages 13 and Older

Content Advisory: regularly occurring swearing, mild references to grief.

I’m Ari Agha (they/them), a fat, Hungari-Arab, genderqueer/transgender singer, creator, and activist. I am the child of two refugees; my mother fled the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and my father is Persian and of Iranian descent and fled Iraq in 1964. A proud advocate of intersectional feminism, my work centers on the voice and connections between voice and identity. My performances are co-created with audiences, harnessing the power of group singing to create community and inspire resistance.

My performance practice changed dramatically about ten years ago. As a lifelong singer, at the age of 39, I had to decide whether to risk my voice by taking testosterone as part of my gender transition. Taking T was risky because there was no research on how it impacted singing, and lots of anecdotes about trans voices ruined by T. Thus, Key of T was born as an act of resistance and a cutting-edge research and performance project. I did research on myself, meticulously tracking how my singing voice changed with T, sharing what I learned with my community, voice teachers, and scholars. With a creative team, I devised an interdisciplinary performance about my voice change experience, also called Key of T. That performance helped me realize that performance was a form of advocacy, and I was hooked. To improve my understanding of voice and my vocal technique, I acquired an MM in voice performance/pedagogy from Arizona State University in 2024, supplementing my 2005 Ph.D. in sociology. I have been touring various iterations of Key of T across North America.

My performance methods include solo and group singing, storytelling, performance art, poetry, experimental soundscapes, projection, puppetry, and interactive installations. I work closely with composers, sonic artists, collaborative pianists, instrumentalists, projectionists, singers/choirs, puppeteers, and designers, and my performances feature compositions by women, queer, and BIPOC composers. I have performed across North America, including invited performances at: GALA Festival 2024 (where I premiered the reimagined verision of Key of T), the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, Butler University: Singing Beyond the Binary, Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed Conference, and at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (College Park, MD).

In addition to performing, as part of Key of T, I teach voice privately, write, and offer workshops and talks. I also work for wages as the Development Officer at Partnerships for Trauma Recovery in Berkeley, California. My co-conspirator, Kim Williams (she/her), and I, along with our four-leggeds, Sunshine, Moose, and Spike-the-cat, make our home on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in the area also known as Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I lived in Washington, DC, from 2005 to 2014.