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March 14, 2023 43 mins

PART NINE - "I remember thinking, am I the only one like me who's ever walked these halls?"

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Speaker 1 (00:11):
The patta da is a fundamental part of ballet. It's
a duet, almost always between a man and a woman.
It's something every professional ballet dancer confronts, usually in their adolescence.
Like most things in ballet, partnering is harder than it looks.
Dancing a potta da tests the lessons you've learned in
the ballet classroom. When she was eighteen, Adriana Pears got

(00:36):
the opportunity to choreograph of patta da for the first time.
It was two thousand and eight and it was for
a student choreography workshop at the school Balanchine founded, the
School of American Ballet. And I was kind of going
through my discovery of my own sexuality at the time.
I just had my heartbroken for the first time, and

(00:59):
so I did this like very sensual, romantic potada. And
the guy really is very passionate about this woman that
he's dancing with and very excited and wanting to kind
of dive in with her. And she's like there, but

(01:21):
not fully, and I think there's something holding her back.
And she lets him take the lead emotionally, and then
they go their separate ways and end apart. Doesn't necessarily
have to do with my life totally at the time,

(01:43):
But I think I was discovering what love was and
what sexuality was, and I knew that I wanted to
elicit some sort of like deep emotional response from the audience.

(02:09):
At the School of American Ballet, Adriana had learned the
mechanics of partnering, what it felt like to put trust
in the boys in her classes to hoist her over
their heads in a suspended overhead lift. Now, in making
her own pada da, she began to understand what that
movement conveyed. So I was using these lifts where she

(02:31):
is really not doing anything with a very specific intention,
and the way I used it was to show that
the woman has no agency, or has less agency, or
is making less like dynamic choices about the relationship. For

(02:51):
My Heart podcasts in Rococo Punch, This is the Turning
Room of Mirrors America Lance Heart nine pot A dum

(03:13):
Adriana remembers when she was a new student at the
School of American Ballet and she first learned how to
shape her fingers in the balancing style, a more open,
rounded hand with splayed fingers and it feels like you're
holding air and when you move through space, it breathes
with you and it feels like very expansive and empowered.

(03:36):
And I remember just thinking to myself, oh yeah, this
is good, Like this makes sense to me in my body.
Adriana says her point shoes had always felt like a
throne to her. She loved the feeling of lifting up
onto the tips of her toes, of lengthening, of growing tall,
but she had yet to confront the role her gender

(03:56):
dictated in this art form. So I can think back
to my first partnering classes at SAB was with Jock Soto,
and he's a fabulous teacher. But what I can remember
from those early days, first of all, I loved it.
I had a great time. But it's very gendered, first

(04:17):
of all, very binary boys and girls. Boys and girls
who have already diverged in their training and how they dance.
The girls have learned to dance on point, to be graceful, flexible,
impossibly elegant. The boys have learned big jumps and tricks,

(04:39):
and teachers have warned some of the boys not to
be too graceful, too feminine. In partnering class, Adriana says
her teacher would turn to the boys and say, lay
pick a girl, and the boys would pick their partners
grab a girl. That's like the terminology. So I just
would okay, grab me, and then we would learn a combination.

(05:02):
And most of it is just the guys having to
figure out how to do it and build the strength,
because you were talking like teenage boys who are not
developed fully either. But it's like they get the opportunity
to learn and to try and to fail and to
grow and to build. And my job as a woman
was to be grabbed and held and let them figure

(05:25):
it out. And I and you put your trust in that.
I never thought differently. You lift me, It's my job
to look pretty and have good technique and like have
my leg high and the guy just has to figure
out how to keep you on your balance. At that
time in my life, I just I really was just absorbing.

(05:52):
She also absorbed how they ended each partner in class.
Boys had to do pushups, girls drilled. Asia pays these
steps where you at least lde your feet in and
out and roll up on to a point. That stuck
with her. The emphasis for the women was their technique
and their lines and their esthetic, and for the men
it was their strength and their core, and I definitely
started thinking about that a lot. A few years later,

(06:14):
she got the chance to choreograph her first Potada, part
of a student choreographic workshop at SAB. It was about
two people in a relationship. The guy is all in,
but the woman is less sure. She lets him pursue her,
then she seems to pull away. She slides along when
he lifts her high above his head. I think I
was discovering what love was and what sexuality was in

(06:38):
my own life, and I knew that I wanted to
elicit some sort of like deep emotional response from the audience.
In partnering class, Adriana had learned how to do these
suspended overhead lifts where the man lifts the woman up
high into the air. She used lifts like that her

(07:00):
Peace in a purposeful way to show the woman is passive,
uncommitted to the relationship, complacent enough to let the man lead.
What audience members responded to was a sensuality of the piece. Women,
especially older women, approached her after your piece. I loved
your Peace. I really responded to that, and I thought
to myself, WHOA Okay, Well then I wow, Yeah, I

(07:21):
think I want to be a professional choreographer, and choreographing,
Adriana found a new kind of freedom, an answer to
the lack of control she sometimes felt in the ballet classroom.
In the classroom, she'd been conditioned to stay silent, to
obey the teacher. She made sure to fit the mold
of the ballerina, pretty thin, feminine, But Adriana still needed

(07:44):
to figure out how she fit. For one thing, the
majority of professional choreographers are men. And then there was
the fact that she still hid a big part of herself.
I remember walking in the halls of sab and thinking, like,

(08:04):
am I the only one like me who's ever walked
these halls. I had never heard of anyone any queer
women before. Never at that time, no. Never. She was
out to her high school friends and a few ballet friends,
but mostly in ballet. She says she felt like she

(08:25):
stuck out, as if she were carrying around a backpack
all the time, an awkward accessory that everyone could see,
but the secret of who she really was was tucked inside.
I didn't have fully have language for myself, even about
who I was, but I knew that people were already
kind of like is she, but like not really knowing.

(08:46):
So when I got into the company at City Ballet,
I was deathly afraid of making the other women uncomfortable.
That was like my overwhelming experience. I was terrified, constant anxiety.
By the time she was an apprentice, she was an
a tenuous position. She had not yet secured an official

(09:08):
spot in the company. In ballet companies, there's a lot
of couples At the time. I remember thinking to myself,
I should get a boyfriend in the company to secure
my job. And I remember having conversations with my a
friend of mine who was also an apprentice gay man,
and we were saying, like that might help us, because

(09:31):
it's so messed up that I thought that that would
actually give me some job security. And not to say
that that is actually the case, but there was some
insurance there if I could like really show that I
was a straight woman, that somehow that would secure my spot.
It was before one performance that it all came to
a head. The women's dressing rooms in the theater are upstairs,

(09:53):
but they had to take the elevator down to the
stage level to get into their costumes, and so all
the court of vallet women, all of them the whole
company are all just like putting their costumas on this
like one room and the dressers and some of the
women were talking about how hot Hugh Jackman is and
so somehow I was in the middle of this conversation
that was happening all around me, and the dresser asked

(10:14):
me which was putting my costume on? She asked me like, oh,
what do you think about Hugh? And I was like,
it's not for me, like I don't know, and she goes,
oh really, but like what who is for you? Like
what kind of guys do you like? And the whole
room stopped talking and like looked to see what I
was gonna say. She was like, no, no, really, like
what's your like man flavor? And I was like, I, well,

(10:39):
I'm gay, and and she goes, no, you're not, and
I was like, oh no, yeah, yeah I am. And
again the whole room like no one moving, no one breathing,
and I'm just like, this is my worst case scenario,
Like I'm in Balanchine's house like with all these naked women,
and I'm just like coming out in front of every

(11:00):
buddy against my will. And then one of my friends,
Maya she came to my aid and she goes, actually,
I'm her flavor, and I was like, thank you, Maya, okay,
cut the tension, and then it was like, okay, no
one knew how to talk about it, and no one

(11:20):
knew how to approach me about it, and everyone knew,
but no one knew and ha, and I wasn't talking
about it, and so it kind of like almost burst
this bubble of like panic. So I'm kind of glad
that happened, but wow, was it traumatic. So that's how
I came out, so that all of the women in
the court of Vallet and New York City Valley in

(11:41):
two thousand and nine, Like so many dancers, she didn't
get a job after her apprenticeship, so she went to
another prestigious ballet company, another company centered on Balanchine's choreography,
Miami City Ballet. She stayed there seven years. She also
Chorea graft when she could. While there, she made a

(12:02):
piece called Cafe Music. She took that first pot of
does she made at SAB and added two more movements,
and this time she approached it differently. I took special
care to pass who's leading and who's following back and
forth and That's just what it was, just what it
was coming out of me naturally. But it wasn't natural

(12:24):
for these professional ballet dancers to dance this way. My
friend Andre, who was the dancer, was having a hard time,
like letting his partner, you know, hold him and pull him.
And I remember the dancers asking me what is this about?
And I said, it's about finding yourself. It's about finding

(12:46):
who you are within your friendships, within your partnerships. When
you're out at a club, when you're out at a bar,
who are you? And how do you relate to the
people around you. As Adriana played with the push and
all of these new ways of partnering and who was
taking the lead, she also rehearsed her original patita with

(13:06):
that overhead lift, she began to realize how little choreographers
considered the meaning of this movement. For her, in men
a surrender of agency, but in practically all other examples
she'd previously seen or danced, it felt like a showpiece,
a feat of strength that hammered home an idea about
the roles of men and women and dance. What I

(13:32):
realized about suspend it overhead lifts is that they are
very gendered because traditionally, what we're used to seeing is
a man lifting a woman, and you, whether it's conscious
or not, understand that it can't be the other way around,
because that's just not what we're used to seeing and
it's also not the way that women are trained or socialized.

(13:53):
After that realization, Adriana choreographed many more ballet pieces, but
she never used another over had lift. She didn't put
them in any of her dances, not a single one.
And when I do use a lift, we moved through it.
I kind of fold it into the fabric of the movement,
so there's never like a point where we're sitting there

(14:14):
and being like that man is lifting that woman. Wow.

(14:38):
At Miami City Ballet, Adriana continued to choreograph pieces. As
she watched the partnering works being created and performed around her,
she was struck with a familiar feeling. We are just
fully accepting the fact that we are always seeing partnerships
where the women have less agency, over and over and
over and over again. In twenty fourteen, Adriana was he'd

(15:00):
an invitation to choreograph a piece for New York City
Ballet Dancers, her old workplace where the director. Peter Martin's
had not offered her a contract to join the company
after her apprenticeship. Now the company was going to perform
her work. Was the first time I'm back in those
studios for someone back in Lincoln Center, since I had
not gotten my job and Martin's didn't hire me. When

(15:22):
she returned to New York, Peter Martin's was still the
director of the company, decades after he'd been chosen to
be Balancinge's successor. And we went out to dinner, right.
They took us out to dinner, and they made sure
to tell me that I was going to be sitting
next to Peter because he knew me, so that would
make him feel comfortable, and that I was responsible somehow
for that. Adriana says throughout the dinner, Peter was chummy

(15:45):
with her, periodically touching her leg or her arm. Again.
She felt like she was playing a role that did
not fit. But like, is that just Peter's behavior. I
don't think so. I think there's this like system, it's
passed down. It has to be. I wasn't there. I
didn't know, mister b I know the stories, I don't
know what's true. I don't know what's not. Adriana grew

(16:05):
up hearing stories and anecdotes passed down through generations of
women who had danced for Balancine. At the time, they
felt useful, like don't think, just do it, offered a
way to get out of her head when she danced,
but there was one quote that always felt off. Ballet
is woman, okay, but woman is what woman is straight,

(16:25):
woman is thin, woman has makeup on, Woman makes her
male director feel confident. If we're using like partnering as
kind of a metaphor, I think it's like what the
woman's role is, Like the men are in charge, the
men make the choices, and we are we are going

(16:46):
to hold ourselves and put our foot out and point
it and be the person who's following, not the person
who's leading. I think it's like the same on stage
and off. That's the legacy. It's like I don't even
know if it's distinctly balanchies or just ballet's legacy, but
it's like those are the roles that we play ballet

(17:06):
as women. But women don't have a say anything that
happens to them or their bodies. Like that's what's passed down,
the choices made about the choreography or staging in ballet's
can perpetuate that. There's a moment in Peter Martin's rendition
of Romeo and Juliet at one point the audience hears

(17:28):
allowed slap the sound of Juliette's father hitting Juliet and
knocking her down, a detail that was an ever part
of Shakespeare's play. The company also performed a work called Odessa.
It was by a Russian choreographer, Alexei Radmonski, and in
the piece he staged a controversial gang rape scene. In

(17:54):
twenty seventeen, the same choreographer, Radmonsky posted on Facebook about
gender equality and ballet, and it got a lot of attention.
He wrote, quote, sorry, there is no such thing as
equality in ballet. Women dance on point, men lift in
support women, women received flowers, men escort women off stage,

(18:14):
not the other way around. I know there are a
couple of exceptions, and I am very comfortable with that.
Due above this caption, he posted an image two dancers
in a patada. The picture was classic, almost stereotypical, but
it had been photoshopped clearly in order to appear absurd.

(18:35):
Instead of the man lifting the woman, the two Tue
point two ballerina lifts the man above her head in
a suspended overhead lift. Adriana says when she saw it,
the post made her physically ill. The idea that this
extremely influential, world famous choreographer would say there was no

(18:56):
equality in ballet and he was okay with that. Adriana thought,
this cannot be the only way we understand gender in ballet.
That was really hard. I can't accept that. I'm like
not okay with that, and I'm absolutely not okay with
moving forward with his art form just not having to
be a consideration, especially with new works being choreographed. Adriana

(19:29):
lives in an upper Manhattan studio apartment. She wears a
backwards baseball cap. When she opened the door, her big
smile almost gleams through miss Small boxes still wait to
be unpacked after a recent move. She rolls her neck,
rubbing an injury that had her paralyzed in bed for
a day. The shower stops running and Adriana's girlfriend emerges

(19:51):
from the bathroom. Ala O'Day AILA's long brown hair is
wavy and damp. She limps over her broken foot, still healing.
Both of them are professional dancers, Adriana perches on her
knees on the bed. Ala hobbles over and hops on.
She snuggles into what seems like an Ala shaped nook

(20:11):
in Adriana's arms. Adriana kisses her forehead and beams if
they share the experience of making art that they love.
It is probably one of the most like freeing feelings
to dance on stage. But obviously, just like ballet as
an art form, there's a heavy influence of sexism racism.

(20:39):
This is Ala O'Day, Adriana's girlfriend. ALA's currently a soloist
at Carolina Ballet. The two of them see a lot
of overlap in their experiences. Just like the world we
live in, there are a lot of systemic issues that
put people into a lot of boxes. Yeah, did you
ever worry that, like you would look too butch on stage?

(21:00):
I mean constantly all the time, because I'm very like physically,
I'm athletic. I'm not like you're a little wafy ballerina.
And so then it's like that's perceived to be more
masculine and athletic because athleticism is stereotyped with masculinity, and
therefore any movement I do is going to be perceived
to be more masculine. So I always am thinking about,

(21:22):
like if I'm in like something that seems like a
role that's more feminine or like the the male view
of femininity, I'm like, oh my god, do I look
like like a lesbian out here? You know? Is that
an issue? When I first came to my Missy Ballet,
there was one of the principal danswers said, oh, is

(21:42):
Agana lesbian because she looks like one? Yeah? And I
from like the moment I started working there, I was
like so terrified that I was like, yeah, that the
way that I dance somehow is like giving me away,
and that people in the eyes would be like that
one dike, you know, Like I don't know, but it
was very scary. No, it is really scary, and like

(22:03):
especially too. I mean, more of my fear was when
I was closeted still in like people would point blank
be like, oh, are you Leslian And then I'd be like, no,
I'm not, and They're like, are you sure. I didn't
even think it was possible to be a queer female
identifying ballet dancer. That was until three years ago, in

(22:27):
twenty twenty Alas at Carolina Ballet. She's sitting in a
choreography workshop. I'm like sitting on the floor. You know,
I was fresh in the company and in walks this blonde, tall,
beautiful woman in a blue stripe button down, and I'm like,

(22:48):
what is that? That is not a straight woman. It
was Adriana walking in to help round the workshop, and
I kept asking around, being like she gay? She gay?
Like I was asking all of my friends and stuff,
and they're like, I don't know, Like I don't know her,
you know whatever. And so, actually, Adriana was the first

(23:08):
um female queer ballet dancer I ever met. You're one
of the first people I like really came out too,
because you walked in and I was like, oh my god,
I'm not alone. And so then I DMG, because you

(23:30):
made a huge impact on me. Clearly, even though I,
you know, knew it was okay to be gay, I
just was like, not in my field, doesn't really exist
because you know, there was no visibility for any queer
women in ballet. It's not part of our world. It's
not part of the conversations that like we're allowed to

(23:51):
have through ballet. Right, So even if even though there
have been queer women throughout history. We don't know who
they are in the same way that I know like
every single one of balancings sexual partners. You know what
I'm saying. It's like, no, that's so true. It felt
impossible because I had just simply never seen that. Periodically,

(24:14):
Adriana gets a text from another queer dancer to check
out an Instagram post, almost like a treasure hunt for
the stories of queer ballet dancers who came before her.
It was on Instagram, Yeah, I did. Adriana scrolls through
her Instagram feed looking for something. This is how this
is like, I don't even know. I have to look
it up. This is what I'm saying. So I actually

(24:35):
don't know how to pronounce that l O I E.
I see. I don't even know how to pronounce it.
But miss Fuller became an overnight sensation when she danced
her patented Serpentine dance at Fully Vijaire in Paris in
eighteen ninety two. Fuller even managed to be openly lesbian
while evoking virtually no tittilation or disapproval in her public Interesting.
Interesting So nineteen fourteen photos from nineteen fourteen, there was

(24:58):
also another one, um oh, here it is Catherine de
ville first first black woman with the Bullshoy in nineteen hundred.
Is her dad was creole, pushed back on doing Copelia
in white face, and despite having two husbands, was queer.
Catherine de Villier. I think it is when I was younger,

(25:19):
like early twenties, I could think of like maybe five
or six, including myself, women around the world who were
in professional ballet companies. Did not just not just in
the US, like around the world of people who were
out you know, we're talking ballet specifically, like tights, point shoes, leotard. Yeah,
there are a lot of people who were in ballet

(25:39):
and were professional but then left because they were like,
I'm you know, I can't be myself in this space.
It's also hard to find any bit of queerness inside
any of the big story ballets. The classics ballet is
known for the gayest role in the ballet cannon is Myrta.
Myrta is a ghost queen in the classical ballet. Gizelle

(26:06):
is ballet cannon choreographed by two men in eighteen forty one,
beloved by audiences, coveted by dancers. Basically, the plot goes
like this, A beautiful young peasant girl and a disguised
nobleman fall in love. She falls in love with this
guy who comes into town who is lying to her
about who he is because really he's royalty, but puts

(26:26):
on peasant's clothes to get this girl because she's pretty,
falls in love. Turns out he's actually a prince and
it's already betrothed to someone else, so he can't be
with her anyway. She's very upset about that. Also, she
has a weak art so weak, and she's not allowed
to dance. She can't dance, So when she finds out

(26:50):
that he's been lying her this entire time, she has
a full on mental breakdown, goes crazy. Legitimately, it's a
mad scene. She's like ripping her hair out and ding
around the stage flat footed and point shoes because that's
the only time we can walk flat foot when you're
going crazy. And then she loses it, and then she dies.

(27:16):
She collapses to the ground and she dies in some
combination of over exertion and a broken heart, and then
her spirit goes to the land of the Willies. The
Willies are like a sisterhood of ghosts in the woods,
ghosts of unmarried women who died after being betrayed by men.
They're all all scored, their scorned women who jilted brides, yes,

(27:40):
virgins who never made it. They died before they got married,
and they've been hurt by their their men. And the
queen of these jilted versions is Mirta. She's the jiltedest
of them all. Mirta is a force in this ballet,
a terrifying figure, bitter and cruel role conceived by the
men who created the ballet almost two hundred years ago,

(28:02):
and one of the most heteronormative ballets in existence. And
she's a man hater. And so if you are a
man and you into the Land of the Willies during
the nighttime, you are sentenced to dance to death. So
Myrta dances all of them to death. After Giselle dies,

(28:27):
the man who betrayed her, Albrecht, goes to her grave
to mourn. He asks forgiveness of her ghost, and he
follows that ghost to the Land of the Willies. He
meets Mirta, who sentences Albrecht to dance to death, but
then Giselle steps in. She helps Albrecht by dancing with
him until morning, when the willies no longer have power.

(28:49):
The strength of her love saves Albrecht. Giselle returns to
her grave, and Albrecht lives. I always feel conflicted in
the beauty of Giselle's passivity. At the start of the ballet,
She's rumbunctious and just loves to dance and death. She's
floating like a wisp, a ghost, almost a corpse, and

(29:14):
some of the act too patadas. She's so passive, but
that liquidity that comes from floating along as Albrecht pulls
her is stunning to watch. I want to dance it.
My feelings about Giselle side. The ballet presents a choice

(29:36):
for its women. You can be a Giselle or Amrita,
one forgiving one vengeful, both defined by their relationships to men.
Myrta is powerful, but still she is one thing, a
representation of failed heteronormativity. In the ballet, she's defined by
the fact that she never married. Both roles feel like

(30:02):
a box. In the winter of twenty twenty one, Adriana
got the chance to tackle her unresolved feelings about the
PoTA da. What the PoTA da means for gender and
for what roles we all play. She got an artist's

(30:22):
residency and drove up to the Catskills and upstate New York.
With two dancers from American Ballet Theater. In a studio
in the woods away from the city, they began to work.
They had two weeks and the goal for that residency
was to work on partnering with two dancers in potchu's.
She wondered what a PoTA da would look like, entirely

(30:44):
on point, How would it even work? What is possible
and what isn't. I thought I would just kind of
play around and see what came, but she found herself
creating an actual piece instead, a new dance, a potada.

(31:04):
This potado, though, would be between two women, two queer women,
something she'd never seen on a ballet stage before. I
think a lot of queer stories are centered around pain
and trauma. Pain and trauma are definitely thinks that queer
people experience every day all over the world. But it's
been important to me to create queer stories that come

(31:26):
from a place of joy and love and respect. Specifically,
this was one that I wanted to feel respectful, overwhelmingly respectful,
and it's not one person manipulating the other. It's two
people with equal agency working together to create something beautiful.
And I think it's not necessarily romantic, although it is,

(31:48):
but it's explicitly queer and that there is love fair
and there is a tenderness. So I started to think about,
like what partnering is, what is it actually what makes
up a potita. She came up with these five pillars
of partnering. First thing lifts, All types of lifts will

(32:12):
go in that category. Then there's counterbalance, like counterweight, so
you're pulling off each other. There's an amount of tension
between the two dancers. There's promenades, things that where one
person is on balance and rotating, like one person is
posed on point. Historically, the woman she puts her hand

(32:32):
on the man's arm and he moves her around in
a circle so that she twirls slowly in place, like
the tiny ballerina you see inside music boxes. And then
there's turns pure wits, so like spinning. And then the
last pillar is what their connection is and what story
they're telling and how they tell it. You think you'd

(32:53):
take that, you keep the hand. She wanted to work
through these pillars in the studio one by one, and
find her own. That's it. There you go, promenade, love
it and one, two three. I don't want to just
stick two dancers on point together and fit them inside

(33:14):
the like traditional rubric, a traditional blueprint of what we
understand partnering to be. It needs to be our own,
it needs to be authentic. And here there we go. Yeah,
and as wide a lunge as possible. Here the piece
became her answers to those five pillars in this space,
with these two dancers telling this story, a story of

(33:36):
respectful queer affection. What's my answer to the idea of
a traditional lift, what's my answer to these like to
a partnered turn? So you're stirring, stay connected? Yeah, well
do it more time. But the other thing that I

(33:57):
had to super dive into was point shoes and how
that affects physicality of partnerships. The person who has the
flat shoe inherently and definitely has more agency than the
person in the point shoe. When you're in a point show,
you are not as grounded as a person in a

(34:17):
flat shoe. You do not have as much strength. So yeah,
I'm in the room with the dancers. I'm trying to
figure out Okay, can you both be on point partnering
each other. No, you can't because you're not stable, you're
on your tippy toes. You can't do it. You cannot
lift you physically, like physically cannot lift another human being
when you are on a point shoe. You cannot do it.

(34:39):
So what it ended up having to be is like
they would kind of pass the leading and following back
and forth, which is what I do anyway in my choreography,
but I would like try to have them on point,
like as close as possible before and after to that
passing of the leading and following. Oh so let I think,
let Sierra be in charge of those arms coming down,

(35:00):
so she's leading at that moment. Another thing they had
to confront was trust. They had to learn a new
kind of trust Sierra, let her really carry you, she's
got you and reach you. Go into an attitude when
I was talking about my partnering classes, where it was
this trust that like the guy's gonna grab me and

(35:22):
he has to figure out and you know what if
he drops me, he has to figure it out. But
when it's a woman like there's we had to really
deal with the fact that we didn't have that trust
in each other. I do not trust that a woman's
gonna get me. I think I'm too heavy. I think
she's gonna drop me. I'm gonna hurt her. Those are
things that like we really have to like work through
in order to do this work, because I am trained

(35:47):
to have trust in a certain type of person doing
a certain type of thing to my body, and that
person usually is a man or identifies as a man.
She remembers, on day one, you put the dancers in
different positions and said, close your eyes, feel each other's weight. Move.
What does it feel like when you take the other

(36:08):
person's weight. Each day, Adriana and the dancers remy and
see her as showed up and together they discover what
worked and problem solved along the way, adding new sections
to the piece. The beginning of the ballet was what

(36:29):
they created last. I had them come out onto the
stage and just stand there. I wanted it to kind
of be like, yeah, you're going to see a gay potita,
now you're ready, and then they start moving. I kept

(36:50):
thinking about this idea of carving space for each other.
The two of them don't touch, they don't even make
eye contact. Neither of them grabs the other, but they
start to move around each other. Their arms flow and
softly slice around the other's silhouette, like they're feeling what

(37:14):
it is to be close, carving space around each other,
making space for each other, then moving within that space,
tracing each other's bodies but not touching each other. There's
a respect in that, and the first time they really
like look at each other. I wanted there to be
like an establishing moment of I don't know, acknowledgment. I

(37:37):
didn't want it to look like choreography that we've seen
before with men and women. So what are different ways
that they can be connected. We'll grab her foot and
put it over your body, like ways that they can
be connected, that it's not just like hand and waste
and back and forth. Watching it, I got shivers and

(38:05):
then I started to well up. Just seeing two women
on stage being centered in a way that has nothing
to do with how men see them felt new. I
realized I hadn't seen it before, not quite like this,
not while they're in point shoes. We don't see women

(38:27):
being tender with each other in vallet. We don't we
don't get to see intimate relationships between two women tender
and affectionate and loving. They dance separately from each other,
trying to figure out what it is they're each saying.

(38:51):
One of them dips the other back, like that classic
tango move, what you've seen a man do to a
woman a hundred times. After she dips her, she immediately
comes up onto point on point together, but you can
see how they're just constantly passing back and forth, who's leading,
who's following, who's on point, who's not, who's in charge?

(39:13):
And then I wanted them to end in some sort
of partnered image. There's this balancing piece. Actually it's in
Midsummer Night's Dream. There's this beautiful potada, beautiful pot of
the second act of the divert small patada, and it
ends so slowly and suspended, and it kind of moves

(39:37):
into this like beautiful lifts that kind of leaves you
just completely breathless, and I wanted that for them. They
walked to the back and she does a fete on
point and Remy kind of pulls back on her. They're

(39:57):
holding each other's weight. I wanted it to be slow
and to kind of go into slow, suspended, partnered moment
where they're working together the music fades until it's gone,

(40:24):
they still move in the silence, slowing, and then it
kind of fizzles into this like last moment of carving
space together. When I watch the piece, it's like, I

(40:47):
feel Ballet is a woman in a new way, in
a way that empowers in a way I don't think
I've ever seen before. And now there's like a whole
new of young people who are just like out chill,
feeling great, and I love that. But Ballet hasn't changed.

(41:08):
So like that's why it's like, we need to be
making more diverse works. We need to be hiring, we
need to be commissioning from more diverse people and telling
more stories so that these people, these young people who
are feeling great about themselves and feeling great about being queer,
have a space to actually exist as themselves, so they
don't have to do the thing that we always had
to do, which was turned that part of us off.

(41:28):
You know, next time on the turning, when you finally

(42:01):
do move on, there's a recovery period, and I think
the recovery period takes about ten years on average to
function in the quote unquote real world. The turning is

(42:28):
a production of Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts. It's written
and produced by Alan Lance, Lesser and Me. Our story
editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed by James Trout.
Jessica Carissa is our assistant producer. Andrea Swahe is our
digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. You can

(42:52):
learn about Adriana's continue to work to showcase LGBTQ plus
artists and stories in ballet at Queer thee Ballet dot
com special thanks to Sierra Armstrong and Remy Young, who
danced in Adriana's potted to Overlook. Music for Overlook provided
by composer Julia Kent. It can be found at music
dot Julia Kent dot com. Our executive producers are John

(43:21):
Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch, I Get, Trina
Norville and Nikki Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and
more details on the series, follow us on Instagram at
Rococo Punch, and you can reach out via email The
Turning at Rococo Punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance. Thanks

(43:43):
for listening.
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