DDP Talks To
"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery
The Guardian: The #QueertheBallet movement: ‘it’s more than a man lifting a woman in a tutu’
By Emily Dixon
10 February 2021
Shortly after Adriana Pierce joined Miami City Ballet, someone watched her train and made an assessment: “Is Adriana a lesbian? Because she looks like one.” The comment propelled Pierce into exacting self-scrutiny: “I was like, does my dancing look gay? Do I look different? I am different – is that OK?”
Pierce, who left the company after seven seasons to focus on choreography and musical theatre, has rarely felt represented as a queer woman in the ballet world but with her new movement, #QueertheBallet, she hopes to inspire change. Her first project is a pas de deux en pointe choreographed on the American Ballet Theatre dancers Remy Young and Sierra Armstrong, which she is developing during a dance residency at the Bridge Street theatre in Catskill, New York. “I want to show people an authentic, complex relationship between two women through ballet,” Pierce explains. “I want people to see that ballet can be more than a man lifting a woman in a tutu.”
Although queer men are also largely cast in heteronormative partnerships, while facing well-documented homophobic stigma, the crucial difference for Pierce is visibility. “Queer women aren’t even on the radar in our spaces. I sometimes do experience overt homophobia, but the worst of it is the micro-aggression. I’m just never considered,” she says. “The idea that a woman might deviate from the image we expect as a professional ballet dancer is just not even a thought people have.”
Read the full article here.
Pointe: Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet’s “Constellation Project” Maps the Complex Histories of 6 Dance Pioneers
By Zoe Phillips
09 February 2021
Last week, Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet celebrated the start of Black History Month with the launch of The Constellation Project, a star-studded online exhibition of dance history. The project maps the lives of six influential Black dancers—Arthur Mitchell, Mel Tomlinson, Lavinia Williams, Mabel Jones Freeman, Doris Jones and Claire Haywood—across a digitally rendered galaxy of historical events, institutions and more. The result is an educational experience that, much like its galaxy-inspired title, will no doubt only continue to grow.
Writer and activist Theresa Ruth Howard founded MoBBallet in 2015 with a fairly simple mission: to make the invisible visible. She started with projects like her Roll Call of Black dancers and the Timeline that traces their presence back into the 19th century. These designs highlighted Black artists as individuals, but the more that Howard learned, the more complex these stories became.
“We don’t dance in a vacuum,” Howard explained recently, “and history is not as siloed as it’s presented when we teach it.”
Read the entire article here.
Dance: Virtual Ballet Classes Have Offered Me Glimpses of Gender Inclusivity as a Nonbinary Dancer
9 February 2021
Growing up, I quit ballet as soon as the schools where I was training no longer required it. Because of ballet’s adherence to a strict gender binary, I often felt excluded and frustrated by the art form, even before I had the language to identify how it heightened my gender dysphoria. Midway through college, I quit dance altogether, except for the occasional class, and took up weight lifting instead. But at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began taking virtual ballet as a way to stay strong and exercise inside my apartment.
A friend of mine was taking classes on Zoom from a teacher who she said was particularly kind and thoughtful, and she invited me to join her. I agreed because I needed a distraction and my muscles craved fatigue. Ballet still made me anxious, and I even cried after class for the first few weeks.
But overall, ballet felt much more casual. Nobody had a barre at home, many people weren’t wearing leotards, and the main focus was on dancing together as best as we could during a time of crisis. Soon, my previous associations with the technique started to fade. Ballet began to ignite joy in me, and I started taking up to five virtual classes a week from New York City studios, like Ballet Arts, Peridance and Broadway Dance Center. In doing so, I’ve caught glimpses of what inclusive, gender-expansive ballet could look and feel like.
I didn’t come to understand myself as nonbinary until I was 20, but when I did, my frustrations with my dance training began to make sense. I remember being 14, looking through the studio windows at the boys’ ballet class and longing to be in there myself, working on leaps and turns and strengthening my shoulders. At home, I practiced tours and could consistently land a clean double. But during class, even when we were given the option to do either tours or turns from fifth, I felt self-conscious, like everyone was looking at me if I chose the “boy” step.
Now, even though I take virtual classes with my camera on, there’s much less scrutiny from my peers or teachers when I, a feminine person, do a typically masculine step. Alone in my apartment, no spotlight catches me, nobody laughs, and my choice isn’t perceived as a statement. I can do tours and mess up. I can be mediocre, because I don’t have to justify why I’m choosing a step that doesn’t match the gender I was assigned at birth.
During virtual classes I feel more comfortable dressing in gender-affirming dancewear. If I go to a studio wearing leggings and a T-shirt, traveling across the floor between women in their beautiful leotards and skirts can make me feel like I don’t belong or like I’m doing something wrong. It also helps that I don’t have large mirrors at home, and while that’s frustrating for self-correcting my alignment, it alleviates the dysphoria of looking in a mirror for an hour and a half, knowing that everybody in the room perceives me as a woman. On Zoom, I can put my pronouns in my screen name.
In a 1988 article titled “Performative Arts and Gender Constitution” in Theater Journal, queer theorist Judith Butler posits that “gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” Virtual classes have given me the opportunity to explore how to do ballet like a nonbinary dancer, like myself. Dancing alone has taught me how to break out of the ingrained training of performing the bodily gestures, movements and enactments of womanhood in ballet.
Read the full story here.
New York Times: On Ballet TikTok, a Place for Young Dancers to Be Real
By Margaret Fuhrer
05 February 2021
“How am I supposed to feel confident in myself when these are the ballet body standards?” begins a TikTok video by user @hardcorpsballet. The question stopped this former dancer mid-scroll. An honest conversation about ballet’s cult of thinness? Yes, please.
Then came the slide show: not a parade of waiflike bodies, but instead the well-padded Bear from Boston Ballet’s “Nutcracker,” and the furred and feathered creatures of Frederick Ashton’s “Tales of Beatrix Potter.”
Reader, I giggled.
I had entered ballet TikTok, where a rule-bound art form meets unruly creativity. Casual, confessional and playful, TikTok offers a release for ballet dancers, particularly students, who spend their days chasing impossible perfection. TikTok is a place to laugh about the impossibility, rather than obsess over perfection.
As more and more stuck-at-home dancers join TikTok, it has also become a place to dissect some of the problems and clichés that dog ballet. Users make darkly funny memes about body dysmorphia, eating disorders, abusive teachers, misogyny and homophobia. They are the same issues that dance films and TV shows mine for drama and melodrama. But the wounded whimsy of ballet TikTok reflects what it actually feels like to be a ballet dancer — the frustrations and joys of a demanding, problematic, beautiful art.
Read the entire article here.
