Ballez Dances with Pride
Cast out by a very monolithic power structure present in so many ballet companies, members of Ballez redefine the genre of dance, changing gender expectations, physical expectations, and even the stories and characters, to best suit our radical queer community.
“I think everyone from the group has their own story of disconnection from ballet,” says Katy Pyle, Artistic Director and founder of the group. “We are all rejects.”
The group’s mission, Pyle explains, is to insert the herstory of lesbians into the ballet canon. Lesbian activists, rabble-rousers, and heroines have all been invisible in ballet. Pyle wants to change all that, as well as challenge the idea of whose bodies belong in ballet.
Reception has been great. The troupe’s performed in numerous venues in the New York metropolitan area, including the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Abrons Art Center. Audiences are composed of queer and straight people, all there to celebrate the diversity and uniqueness of the people they see on stage.
“Straight people also suffer from the rigidity of gender norms and expectations, and aside from that, the stories and experiences of queer people are valuable to the entire culture,” explains Pyle.
Ian Douglas courtesy American Realness (pictured: Princes from The Firebird)
Past hits include “The Firebird, a Ballez”, a version of Mikhail Fokine and Igor Stravinsky’s eponymous 1910 ballet. It introduces a recently divorced lesbian princess and a “tranimal” (part bird, part prince!) as they seek liberation in a magically perverse landscape of polyamorous princes and a magical sorceress. Pyle cast herself as “Lesbian Princess,” adapting the original heroic role of the “Prince” who finds the Firebird in the woods for a romantic rendezvous. Pyle maintained a feminine gender presentation as the Princess, but leapt and turned and acted chivalrous–al tropes of male ballet dancers–and all done in her tutu.
Pyle now sets her talents on a piece called “Sleeping Beauty and the Beast,” a two-act, two-theater production united by an audience-participatory time-shifting street protest march, glorifying the stories of lesbian activists through ballet. The narrative moves from the striking Lower East Side garment workers of 1893 to the AIDS activist dykes of the same neighborhood in 1993.
And if seeing a performance doesn’t fulfill you to the max, no worries. You can join in on the fun as well. The group has been offering a public, open-level, weekly “Adult Ballez” class at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange since 2012.
For more information on performances and classes, see www.ballez.org