March 14, 2023 • 43 mins
PART NINE - "I remember thinking, am I the only one like me who's ever walked these halls?"
For more content, follow us on Instagram @RococoPunch
TRANSCRIPT - https://www.rococopunch.com/turningtranscripts
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 at pata dua tests the lessons you've learned in
the ballet classroom. When she was eighteen, Adrianna Pears got
(00:36):
the opportunity to choreograph a patada for the first time.
It was two thousand and eight and it was for
a student choreography workshop at the school Balancine founded, the
School of American Ballet.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
And I was kind of going through my discovery of
my own sexuality at the time. I just had my
heart broken for the first time, and so I did
this like very sensual, romantic potada. And the guy really
(01:11):
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 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
(01:40):
with my life totally at the time, 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.
Speaker 1 (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 patada, she began to understand what that movement conveyed.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
So I was using these lifts where she 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.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
For My Heart podcasts in Rococo Punch, This is the
Turning Room of Mirrors America Lands, Part nine, how to
dom Adriana remembers when she was a new student at
(03:15):
the School of American Ballet and she first learned how
to shape her fingers in the Balancine style, a more open,
rounded hand with splayed fingers.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
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. And I remembered just thinking
to myself, oh yeah, this is good, Like this makes
sense to me in my body.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Adriana says her points us 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
dictated in this art form.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
So I can think back to my first partnering classes
at SAB was with Jock Soto, and she's a fabulous teacher.
But what I can remember from those early days, first
of all, I loved it. I had a great time.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
But it's very gendered, first 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.
(04:37):
The boys have learned big jumps and tricks, 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 pick a girl, and
the boys would pick their partners grab a girl.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That's like the terminology. So I just would okay, grab me,
and then we would learn a combination. 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
(05:16):
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 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
(05:38):
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 was just I really was just absorbing.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
She also absorbed how they ended each partnering class. Boys
had to do pushups, girls drilled ashia pes, these steps
where you ra but lea slide your feet in and
out and roll up on the point. That stuck with her.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The emphasis for the women was their technique and their
lines and their aesthetic, and for the men it was
their strength and their core, and I definitely started thinking
about that a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
A few years later, she got the chance to choreograph
her first Potida, part of a student choreographic workshop at SAP.
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.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I think I was discovering what love was and what
sexuality was in my own life, and I knew that
I wanted to elicit some sort of like deep emotional
response from the audience.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
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
piece 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 the sensuality of the piece. Women,
(07:12):
especially older women, approached her after your piece.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
I loved your piece. I really responded to that, and
I thought to myself, WHOA okay? Well, and then I wow, yeah,
I think I want to be a professional choreographer.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
In 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 to figure out how she fit. For
(07:50):
one thing, the majority of professional choreographers are men. And
then there was the fact that she still hid a
big part of herself.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I remember walking in the halls of sab and thinking, like,
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.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
She was out to her high school friends and a
few ballet friends, but mostly in ballet, She says she
felt like she 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.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
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.
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.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
By the time she was an apprentice, she was in
a tenuous position. She had not yet secured an official
spot in the company.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
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 friend of mine, who was also
an apprentice gay man, and we were saying, like that
might help us, because it's so messed up that I
(09:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
It was before one performance that it all came to
a head. The women's dressing rooms in the theater are upstairs,
but they had to take the elevator down to the
stage level to get into their costumes, and so all
the quarter Valley women, all of them the whole company
are all just like putting their costumes on in this
like one room, and the dressers and some of the
women were talking about how hot Hugh Jackman is and
(10:10):
so somehow I was in the middle of this conversation
that was happening all around me, and the dresser asked
me which was putting my cost Munch 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 then like who is for you?
Speaker 2 (10:23):
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, ah,
I'm gay, and she goes, no, you're not, and I
(10:43):
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 Valanchine's house like with all these naked women,
and I'm just like coming out in front of every
against my will. And then one of my friends, Maya,
(11:06):
she came to my aid, and she goes, actually, I'm
her flavor, and I was like, thank you, Maya. Okay,
she cut the tension, and then it was like, okay,
no one knew how to talk about it, and no
one knew how to approached me about it, and everyone knew,
but no one knew and hah, and I wasn't talking
about it, and so it kind of like almost burst
(11:27):
this bubble of like panic. So I'm kind of glad
that happened, but wow, is it traumatic. So that's how
I came out to all of the women in the
Court of Ballet and ne York City Valley in two
thousand and nine.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
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 Balancine's choreography, Miami City Ballet. She
stayed there seven years. She also Korea when she could.
While there, she made a piece called Cafe Music. She
took that first pott of dough she'd made at SAB
(12:07):
and added two more movements, and this time she approached
it differently.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
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 was coming out of me naturally.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
But it wasn't natural for these professional ballet dancers to
dance this way.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
My friend Andre, who was the dancer, was having a
hard time, like letting his partner, you know, hold him
or 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 who you are within your friendships, within
your partnerships. When you're out at a club, when you're
(12:51):
out at a bar, who are you and how do
you relate to the people around you.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
As Adriana played with the push and of these new
ways of partnering and who was taking the lead, she
also rehearsed her original padata with that overhead lift, she
began to realize how little choreographers consider the meaning of
this movement. For her, in mena surrender of agency, but
in practically all other examples she'd previously seen or danced,
(13:21):
it felt like a showpiece, a feed of strength that
hammered home an idea about the roles of men and
women in dance.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
What I 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 it's just not what we're used
to seeing, and it's also not the way that women
are trained or socialized.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
After that realization, Adriana choreographed many more ballet pieces, but
she never used another over lift. She didn't put them
in any of her dances, not a single one.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And when I do use a lift, we move through it.
I kind of fold it into like the fabric of
the movement, so there's never like a point where we're
sitting there and being like that man is lifting that woman. Wow.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
In twenty fourteen, Adriana was he'd 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.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
It was the first time I'm back in those studios
for someone back in Lincoln Center, since I had not
gotten my job and Peter Martin's didn't hire me.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
When she returned to New York, Peter Martins was still
the director of the company, decades after he'd been chosen
to be Balancine's successor.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And we went out to dinner right that 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.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Adriana says throughout the dinner, Peter was chumming with her,
periodically touching her leg or her arm. Again, she felt
like she was playing a role that did not fit.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Adriana grew up hearing stories and anecdotes passed down through
generations of women who had danced for balancing. 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.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Ballet is woman, okay, but woman is what woman is straight,
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
(16:43):
men make the choices, and we are We're gonna 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 balanchees or just ballet's legacy, but it's like
(17:04):
those are the roles that we play ballet as women.
But women don't have a say anything that happens to
them or their bodies. Like that's what's passed down.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
The choices made about the choreography or staging in ballets
can perpetuate that. There's a moment. In Peter Martin's rendition
of Romeo and Juliet, at one point, the audience hears
a loud slap, the sound of Juliette's father hitting Juliet
and knocking her down, a detail that was never part
(17:36):
of Shakespeare's play. The company also performed a work called Odessa.
It was by a Russian choreographer, Alexey Radmonsky, and in
the piece he staged a controversial gang rape scene. In
twenty seventeen, the same choreographer, Redmonsky, posted on Facebook about
(17:58):
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 and
support women, women receive flowers, Men escort women off stage,
not the other way around. I know there are a
couple of exceptions, and I am very comfortable with that
(18:20):
end quote Above this caption, he posted an image two
dancers in Apatida. The picture was classic, almost stereotypical, but
it had been photoshopped clearly in order to appear absurd.
Instead of the man lifting the woman, the two tuned
point two ballerina lifts the man above her head in
(18:42):
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
equality in ballet and he was okay with that. Adriana thought,
this cannot be the only way we understand gender in ballet.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
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 not
be a consideration, especially with newarks being quarreographed.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Adriana lives in an upper Manhattan studio apartment. She wears
a backwards baseball cap. When she opens 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 odey. ALA'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. Aila hopples 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 is.
They share the experience of making art that they love.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
This is ala Odey, Adriana's girlfriend. AILA's currently a soloist
at Carolina Ballet. The two of them see a lot
of overlap in their experiences.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Just like the world we live in, there are a
lot of systemic issues that put people into a lot
of boxes.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah, did you ever worry that, like you would look
to butch on stage?
Speaker 3 (21:00):
I mean constantly all the time, because I'm very like physically,
I'm athletic. I'm not like your 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?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
You know? Is that an issue? When I first came
to Mimas Ballet, there was a one of the principal
dancers said, oh, is age on a 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
(21:56):
the audience would be like that one dyke, you know, Like.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I don't know, but it was very scary. No, it
is really scary, and like 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 answer.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
That was until three years ago, in twenty twenty, he
lives at Carolina Ballet. She's sitting in a choreography workshop.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I'm like sitting on the floor. You know.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
I was fresh in the company and in walks this blonde, tall,
beautiful woman in a blue stripe button down, and I'm like,
what is that?
Speaker 2 (22:51):
That is not a straight woman.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
It was Adriana walking in to help run the workshop.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
And I kept asking around, being like she gay? Is
she gay? Like I was asking it all of my
friends and stuff, and they're like.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
I don't know, Like I don't know her, you know whatever.
And so, actually, Adriana was the voice female queer ballet
dancer I ever met. You're one of the first people
I like really came out to because you walked in
(23:25):
and I was like, oh my god, I'm not alone.
And so then I damned you because you made a
huge impact on me. Clearly, even though I 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.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
It's not part of our world. It's not part of
the conversations that like we're allowed to have through ballet. Right,
So 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 Valancine's sexual partners.
You know what I'm saying. It's like, no, that's so true.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
It felt impossible because I had just simply never seen it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Periodically, 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 instag was on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, I did.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Adriana scrolls through her Instagram feed looking for something.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
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 don't know how to pronounce that lie
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 Fulle Brgier in Paris in
eighteen ninety two. Fuller even managed to be openly lesbian
(24:50):
while evoking virtually no titilation or disapproval in her public Interesting.
Interesting So nineteen fourteen's photos From nineteen fourteen, there was
also another one. Oh. Here it is Catherine de Ville,
first first black woman with the Bolshoy in nineteen hundred ish.
Her dad was Creole push back on doing Coopelia in
(25:11):
white face, and despite having two husbands, was queer Captain Davillier.
I think it is when I was younger, like early twenties,
I could think of like maybe five or six, including myself,
women around the world who were in professional ballet companies,
not just in names, like around the world, people who
were out, you know, and we're talking ballet specifically, like tights,
(25:34):
point shoes, leotards. Yeah, there are a lot of people
who were in ballet and were professional but then left
because they were like, I'm you know, I can't be
myself in this space.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
It's also hard to find any bit of queerness inside
any of the big story ballets. The classics ballet is
known for.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
The gayest role in the ballet canon is Murta.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Mirta is a ghost queen in the classical ballet. Giselle
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
(26:17):
nobleman fall in love.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
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 on peasants' clothes to
get this girl because she's pretty, falls in love. Turns
out he's actually a prince and is already betrothed to
someone else, so he can't be with her anyway. She's
very upset about that. Also, she has a weak heart,
(26:41):
so weak, and she's not allowed to dance. She can't dance,
So when she finds out 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 around the stage flat footed and
(27:02):
point shoes because that's the only time we can walk
flat footed, and when you're going crazy, and then she
loses it, and then she dies.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
They're all scorn. There's scorn women who jilted virgins who
never made it, died before they got married.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Yeah, and they've been hurt by their their men.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
And the queen of these jilted versions is Mirta. She's
a jiltedest of the mall.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Mirta is a force in this ballet, a terrifying figure,
bitter and cool role conceived by the men who created
the ballet almost two hundred years ago, and one of
the most heteronormative ballets in existence.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
And she is a man hater.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And so if you are a man and you enter
the Land of the Willies during the nighttime, you are
sentenced to dance to death. So Mirta dances all of
them to death.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
After Giselle dies, the man who betrayed her, Albricht, 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 Albricht to dance to death,
but then Giselle steps in. She helps Albricht by dancing
with him until morning, when the willies no longer have power.
(28:49):
The strength of her love saves Albricht, Giselle returns to
her grave, and Albricht lives. I always feel conflicted in
the beauty of Jazelle's passivity. At the start of the ballet,
She's rambunctious 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 to you patads. 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 aside. The ballet presents a choice
(29:36):
for its women. You can be a Gizelle or a Mirta,
one forgiving, one vengeful, both defined by their relationships to men.
Mirta 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 Patada.
What the Patada means for gender and for what roles
we all play she got an artist residency and drove
(30:24):
up to the Catskills in 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.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Weeks and the goal for that residency was to work
on partnering with two dancers in points choos.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
She wondered what a patada would look like entirely on point,
How would it even work?
Speaker 2 (30:47):
What is possible and what isn't. I thought I would
just kind of play around and see what came.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
But she found herself creating an actual piece instead, a
new dance a potada. This patado, though, would be between
two women, two queer women, something she'd never seen on
a ballet stage before.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
I think a lot of queer stories are centered around
pain and trauma. Pain and trauma are definitely things that
queer people experience every day all over the world. But
it's been important to me to create peer stories that
come from a place of joy and love and respect. Specifically,
this was one that I wanted to feel respectful, overwhelmingly respectful.
(31:36):
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,
but it's explicitly queer in that there is love fare
and there is a tenderness. So I started to think about,
(31:59):
like what partnering is, what is it actually what makes.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Up a potative? She came up with these five pillars
of partnering.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
First thing lifts, All types of lifts will go in
that category. Then there's counterbalance, like counterweight, so you're pulling
off each other, so there's an amount of tension between
the two dancers. There's promenades, things that were one person
is on balance and rotating.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Like one person is posed on point. Historically, the woman
she puts her hand on the man's arm and he
moves her around in a circle so that she twirls
slowly in place like the tiny ballery now you see
inside music boxes.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
And then there's turns pure witz 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 take that, you keep the hand.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
She wanted to work through these pillars in the studio
one by one and find her own verse.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
That's it. There, You go prom and I love it
and one, two, three, four, five, six. I don't want
to just stick two dancers on point together and fit
them inside the traditional rubric, a traditional blueprint of what
we understand partner to be. It needs to be our own,
it needs to be authentic. And here there we go. Yeah,
(33:25):
and as wide a lunge as possible.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Here here is the piece became her answers to those
five pillars.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
In this space, with these two dancers telling this story,
a story of respectful queer affection. What's my answer to
the idea of a traditional lift, what's my answer to
these like to a partner turn? So you're stirring, stay connected? Yeah,
(33:53):
we do it one time. But the other thing that
I had to super dive into was point shoes and
how that affects the physicality of partnerships. The person who
has the flat shoe inherently and definitely has more agency
than the person in the points you. When you're in
(34:14):
a points you, you are not as grounded as a
person in a 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 partner 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
(34:36):
human being when you are on a point show. You
cannot do it. So what it ended up having to
be is like they would kind of pass the leading
and falling 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
(34:59):
of those arms coming down, so she's leading at that moment.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Another thing they had to confront was trust. They had
to learn a new kind of trust.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Sierra, let her really carry you, she's got you and
reach so 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 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.
(35:32):
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 to have trust in
a certain type of person doing a certain type of
thing to my body, and that person usually is a
(35:55):
man or identifies as a man.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
She remembers. On date, she 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 person's weight. Each day, Adriana and the dancers Remy
and si Her showed up and together they discover what
(36:21):
worked and problem solved along the way, adding new sections
to the piece. The beginning of the ballet was what
they created last.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
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 potota, now you ready,
And then they start moving. I kept thinking about this
idea of carving space for each other.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
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
it is.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
To be close, carving space around each other.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Making space for each other, then moving within.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
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 didn't want it to look like choreography that we've
seen before with men and women. So what are different
(37:43):
ways that they can be connected? Well, grab our 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.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Watching it, I got shivers and 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.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
We don't see women being tender with each other in ballet.
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.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
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? And then I wanted them
to end in some sort of partnered image. There's this
(39:22):
balancing piece. Actually it's in Midsummer Night's Dream. There's this
beautiful patada, beautiful PoTA the second act of the divertse
small patata, and it ends so slowly and suspended, and
it kind of moves into this beautiful lift that kind
of leaves you just completely breathless, and I wanted that
(39:43):
for them. They walk to the back and she does
a point and it remy kind of pulls back on her.
They're holding each other's weight. I wanted it to be
slow and to kind of go into slow, suspended, partnered
(40:09):
moment where they're working together.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
The music fades until it's gone. They still move in
the silence, slowing.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
And then it kind of fizzles into this like last
moment of carving space together.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
When I watch the piece, it's like I 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.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
And now there's like a whole new of young people
who are just like out Jill, feeling great and I
love that. But Ballet hasn't changed. 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
(41:17):
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 turn that part of us off.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
The quote unquote real world. The Turning is 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
(42:41):
Crisa is our assistant producer. Andrea Assuage is our digital producer.
Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. You can learn about
Adriana's continued work to showcase LGBTQ plus artists and stories
in ballet at Queerdeballet dot com. Special thanks to Sierra
(43:02):
Armstrong and Remy Young, who danced and adrianas 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 jog Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rococo
(43:23):
Punch at Katrina Norvel and Niki 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 for listening.
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 at pata dua tests the lessons you've learned in
the ballet classroom. When she was eighteen, Adrianna Pears got
(00:36):
the opportunity to choreograph a patada for the first time.
It was two thousand and eight and it was for
a student choreography workshop at the school Balancine founded, the
School of American Ballet.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
And I was kind of going through my discovery of
my own sexuality at the time. I just had my
heart broken for the first time, and so I did
this like very sensual, romantic potada. And the guy really
(01:11):
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 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
(01:40):
with my life totally at the time, 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.
Speaker 1 (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 patada, she began to understand what that movement conveyed.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
So I was using these lifts where she 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.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
For My Heart podcasts in Rococo Punch, This is the
Turning Room of Mirrors America Lands, Part nine, how to
dom Adriana remembers when she was a new student at
(03:15):
the School of American Ballet and she first learned how
to shape her fingers in the Balancine style, a more open,
rounded hand with splayed fingers.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
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. And I remembered just thinking
to myself, oh yeah, this is good, Like this makes
sense to me in my body.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Adriana says her points us 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
dictated in this art form.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
So I can think back to my first partnering classes
at SAB was with Jock Soto, and she's a fabulous teacher.
But what I can remember from those early days, first
of all, I loved it. I had a great time.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
But it's very gendered, first 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.
(04:37):
The boys have learned big jumps and tricks, 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 pick a girl, and
the boys would pick their partners grab a girl.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That's like the terminology. So I just would okay, grab me,
and then we would learn a combination. 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
(05:16):
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 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
(05:38):
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 was just I really was just absorbing.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
She also absorbed how they ended each partnering class. Boys
had to do pushups, girls drilled ashia pes, these steps
where you ra but lea slide your feet in and
out and roll up on the point. That stuck with her.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The emphasis for the women was their technique and their
lines and their aesthetic, and for the men it was
their strength and their core, and I definitely started thinking
about that a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
A few years later, she got the chance to choreograph
her first Potida, part of a student choreographic workshop at SAP.
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.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I think I was discovering what love was and what
sexuality was in my own life, and I knew that
I wanted to elicit some sort of like deep emotional
response from the audience.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
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
piece 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 the sensuality of the piece. Women,
(07:12):
especially older women, approached her after your piece.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
I loved your piece. I really responded to that, and
I thought to myself, WHOA okay? Well, and then I wow, yeah,
I think I want to be a professional choreographer.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
In 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 to figure out how she fit. For
(07:50):
one thing, the majority of professional choreographers are men. And
then there was the fact that she still hid a
big part of herself.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I remember walking in the halls of sab and thinking, like,
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.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
She was out to her high school friends and a
few ballet friends, but mostly in ballet, She says she
felt like she 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.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
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.
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.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
By the time she was an apprentice, she was in
a tenuous position. She had not yet secured an official
spot in the company.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
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 friend of mine, who was also
an apprentice gay man, and we were saying, like that
might help us, because it's so messed up that I
(09:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
It was before one performance that it all came to
a head. The women's dressing rooms in the theater are upstairs,
but they had to take the elevator down to the
stage level to get into their costumes, and so all
the quarter Valley women, all of them the whole company
are all just like putting their costumes on in this
like one room, and the dressers and some of the
women were talking about how hot Hugh Jackman is and
(10:10):
so somehow I was in the middle of this conversation
that was happening all around me, and the dresser asked
me which was putting my cost Munch 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 then like who is for you?
Speaker 2 (10:23):
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, ah,
I'm gay, and she goes, no, you're not, and I
(10:43):
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 Valanchine's house like with all these naked women,
and I'm just like coming out in front of every
against my will. And then one of my friends, Maya,
(11:06):
she came to my aid, and she goes, actually, I'm
her flavor, and I was like, thank you, Maya. Okay,
she cut the tension, and then it was like, okay,
no one knew how to talk about it, and no
one knew how to approached me about it, and everyone knew,
but no one knew and hah, and I wasn't talking
about it, and so it kind of like almost burst
(11:27):
this bubble of like panic. So I'm kind of glad
that happened, but wow, is it traumatic. So that's how
I came out to all of the women in the
Court of Ballet and ne York City Valley in two
thousand and nine.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
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 Balancine's choreography, Miami City Ballet. She
stayed there seven years. She also Korea when she could.
While there, she made a piece called Cafe Music. She
took that first pott of dough she'd made at SAB
(12:07):
and added two more movements, and this time she approached
it differently.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
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 was coming out of me naturally.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
But it wasn't natural for these professional ballet dancers to
dance this way.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
My friend Andre, who was the dancer, was having a
hard time, like letting his partner, you know, hold him
or 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 who you are within your friendships, within
your partnerships. When you're out at a club, when you're
(12:51):
out at a bar, who are you and how do
you relate to the people around you.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
As Adriana played with the push and of these new
ways of partnering and who was taking the lead, she
also rehearsed her original padata with that overhead lift, she
began to realize how little choreographers consider the meaning of
this movement. For her, in mena surrender of agency, but
in practically all other examples she'd previously seen or danced,
(13:21):
it felt like a showpiece, a feed of strength that
hammered home an idea about the roles of men and
women in dance.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
What I 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 it's just not what we're used
to seeing, and it's also not the way that women
are trained or socialized.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
After that realization, Adriana choreographed many more ballet pieces, but
she never used another over lift. She didn't put them
in any of her dances, not a single one.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And when I do use a lift, we move through it.
I kind of fold it into like the fabric of
the movement, so there's never like a point where we're
sitting there and being like that man is lifting that woman. Wow.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
In twenty fourteen, Adriana was he'd 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.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
It was the first time I'm back in those studios
for someone back in Lincoln Center, since I had not
gotten my job and Peter Martin's didn't hire me.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
When she returned to New York, Peter Martins was still
the director of the company, decades after he'd been chosen
to be Balancine's successor.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And we went out to dinner right that 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.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Adriana says throughout the dinner, Peter was chumming with her,
periodically touching her leg or her arm. Again, she felt
like she was playing a role that did not fit.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Adriana grew up hearing stories and anecdotes passed down through
generations of women who had danced for balancing. 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.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Ballet is woman, okay, but woman is what woman is straight,
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
(16:43):
men make the choices, and we are We're gonna 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 balanchees or just ballet's legacy, but it's like
(17:04):
those are the roles that we play ballet as women.
But women don't have a say anything that happens to
them or their bodies. Like that's what's passed down.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
The choices made about the choreography or staging in ballets
can perpetuate that. There's a moment. In Peter Martin's rendition
of Romeo and Juliet, at one point, the audience hears
a loud slap, the sound of Juliette's father hitting Juliet
and knocking her down, a detail that was never part
(17:36):
of Shakespeare's play. The company also performed a work called Odessa.
It was by a Russian choreographer, Alexey Radmonsky, and in
the piece he staged a controversial gang rape scene. In
twenty seventeen, the same choreographer, Redmonsky, posted on Facebook about
(17:58):
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 and
support women, women receive flowers, Men escort women off stage,
not the other way around. I know there are a
couple of exceptions, and I am very comfortable with that
(18:20):
end quote Above this caption, he posted an image two
dancers in Apatida. The picture was classic, almost stereotypical, but
it had been photoshopped clearly in order to appear absurd.
Instead of the man lifting the woman, the two tuned
point two ballerina lifts the man above her head in
(18:42):
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
equality in ballet and he was okay with that. Adriana thought,
this cannot be the only way we understand gender in ballet.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
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 not
be a consideration, especially with newarks being quarreographed.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Adriana lives in an upper Manhattan studio apartment. She wears
a backwards baseball cap. When she opens 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 odey. ALA'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. Aila hopples 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 is.
They share the experience of making art that they love.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
This is ala Odey, Adriana's girlfriend. AILA's currently a soloist
at Carolina Ballet. The two of them see a lot
of overlap in their experiences.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Just like the world we live in, there are a
lot of systemic issues that put people into a lot
of boxes.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah, did you ever worry that, like you would look
to butch on stage?
Speaker 3 (21:00):
I mean constantly all the time, because I'm very like physically,
I'm athletic. I'm not like your 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?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
You know? Is that an issue? When I first came
to Mimas Ballet, there was a one of the principal
dancers said, oh, is age on a 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
(21:56):
the audience would be like that one dyke, you know, Like.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I don't know, but it was very scary. No, it
is really scary, and like 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 answer.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
That was until three years ago, in twenty twenty, he
lives at Carolina Ballet. She's sitting in a choreography workshop.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I'm like sitting on the floor. You know.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
I was fresh in the company and in walks this blonde, tall,
beautiful woman in a blue stripe button down, and I'm like,
what is that?
Speaker 2 (22:51):
That is not a straight woman.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
It was Adriana walking in to help run the workshop.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
And I kept asking around, being like she gay? Is
she gay? Like I was asking it all of my
friends and stuff, and they're like.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
I don't know, Like I don't know her, you know whatever.
And so, actually, Adriana was the voice female queer ballet
dancer I ever met. You're one of the first people
I like really came out to because you walked in
(23:25):
and I was like, oh my god, I'm not alone.
And so then I damned you because you made a
huge impact on me. Clearly, even though I 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.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
It's not part of our world. It's not part of
the conversations that like we're allowed to have through ballet. Right,
So 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 Valancine's sexual partners.
You know what I'm saying. It's like, no, that's so true.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
It felt impossible because I had just simply never seen it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Periodically, 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 instag was on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, I did.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Adriana scrolls through her Instagram feed looking for something.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
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 don't know how to pronounce that lie
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 Fulle Brgier in Paris in
eighteen ninety two. Fuller even managed to be openly lesbian
(24:50):
while evoking virtually no titilation or disapproval in her public Interesting.
Interesting So nineteen fourteen's photos From nineteen fourteen, there was
also another one. Oh. Here it is Catherine de Ville,
first first black woman with the Bolshoy in nineteen hundred ish.
Her dad was Creole push back on doing Coopelia in
(25:11):
white face, and despite having two husbands, was queer Captain Davillier.
I think it is when I was younger, like early twenties,
I could think of like maybe five or six, including myself,
women around the world who were in professional ballet companies,
not just in names, like around the world, people who
were out, you know, and we're talking ballet specifically, like tights,
(25:34):
point shoes, leotards. Yeah, there are a lot of people
who were in ballet and were professional but then left
because they were like, I'm you know, I can't be
myself in this space.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
It's also hard to find any bit of queerness inside
any of the big story ballets. The classics ballet is
known for.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
The gayest role in the ballet canon is Murta.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Mirta is a ghost queen in the classical ballet. Giselle
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
(26:17):
nobleman fall in love.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
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 on peasants' clothes to
get this girl because she's pretty, falls in love. Turns
out he's actually a prince and is already betrothed to
someone else, so he can't be with her anyway. She's
very upset about that. Also, she has a weak heart,
(26:41):
so weak, and she's not allowed to dance. She can't dance,
So when she finds out 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 around the stage flat footed and
(27:02):
point shoes because that's the only time we can walk
flat footed, and when you're going crazy, and then she
loses it, and then she dies.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
They're all scorn. There's scorn women who jilted virgins who
never made it, died before they got married.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Yeah, and they've been hurt by their their men.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
And the queen of these jilted versions is Mirta. She's
a jiltedest of the mall.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Mirta is a force in this ballet, a terrifying figure,
bitter and cool role conceived by the men who created
the ballet almost two hundred years ago, and one of
the most heteronormative ballets in existence.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
And she is a man hater.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And so if you are a man and you enter
the Land of the Willies during the nighttime, you are
sentenced to dance to death. So Mirta dances all of
them to death.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
After Giselle dies, the man who betrayed her, Albricht, 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 Albricht to dance to death,
but then Giselle steps in. She helps Albricht by dancing
with him until morning, when the willies no longer have power.
(28:49):
The strength of her love saves Albricht, Giselle returns to
her grave, and Albricht lives. I always feel conflicted in
the beauty of Jazelle's passivity. At the start of the ballet,
She's rambunctious 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 to you patads. 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 aside. The ballet presents a choice
(29:36):
for its women. You can be a Gizelle or a Mirta,
one forgiving, one vengeful, both defined by their relationships to men.
Mirta 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 Patada.
What the Patada means for gender and for what roles
we all play she got an artist residency and drove
(30:24):
up to the Catskills in 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.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Weeks and the goal for that residency was to work
on partnering with two dancers in points choos.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
She wondered what a patada would look like entirely on point,
How would it even work?
Speaker 2 (30:47):
What is possible and what isn't. I thought I would
just kind of play around and see what came.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
But she found herself creating an actual piece instead, a
new dance a potada. This patado, though, would be between
two women, two queer women, something she'd never seen on
a ballet stage before.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
I think a lot of queer stories are centered around
pain and trauma. Pain and trauma are definitely things that
queer people experience every day all over the world. But
it's been important to me to create peer stories that
come from a place of joy and love and respect. Specifically,
this was one that I wanted to feel respectful, overwhelmingly respectful.
(31:36):
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,
but it's explicitly queer in that there is love fare
and there is a tenderness. So I started to think about,
(31:59):
like what partnering is, what is it actually what makes.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Up a potative? She came up with these five pillars
of partnering.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
First thing lifts, All types of lifts will go in
that category. Then there's counterbalance, like counterweight, so you're pulling
off each other, so there's an amount of tension between
the two dancers. There's promenades, things that were one person
is on balance and rotating.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Like one person is posed on point. Historically, the woman
she puts her hand on the man's arm and he
moves her around in a circle so that she twirls
slowly in place like the tiny ballery now you see
inside music boxes.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
And then there's turns pure witz 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 take that, you keep the hand.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
She wanted to work through these pillars in the studio
one by one and find her own verse.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
That's it. There, You go prom and I love it
and one, two, three, four, five, six. I don't want
to just stick two dancers on point together and fit
them inside the traditional rubric, a traditional blueprint of what
we understand partner to be. It needs to be our own,
it needs to be authentic. And here there we go. Yeah,
(33:25):
and as wide a lunge as possible.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Here here is the piece became her answers to those
five pillars.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
In this space, with these two dancers telling this story,
a story of respectful queer affection. What's my answer to
the idea of a traditional lift, what's my answer to
these like to a partner turn? So you're stirring, stay connected? Yeah,
(33:53):
we do it one time. But the other thing that
I had to super dive into was point shoes and
how that affects the physicality of partnerships. The person who
has the flat shoe inherently and definitely has more agency
than the person in the points you. When you're in
(34:14):
a points you, you are not as grounded as a
person in a 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 partner 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
(34:36):
human being when you are on a point show. You
cannot do it. So what it ended up having to
be is like they would kind of pass the leading
and falling 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
(34:59):
of those arms coming down, so she's leading at that moment.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Another thing they had to confront was trust. They had
to learn a new kind of trust.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Sierra, let her really carry you, she's got you and
reach so 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 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.
(35:32):
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 to have trust in
a certain type of person doing a certain type of
thing to my body, and that person usually is a
(35:55):
man or identifies as a man.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
She remembers. On date, she 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 person's weight. Each day, Adriana and the dancers Remy
and si Her showed up and together they discover what
(36:21):
worked and problem solved along the way, adding new sections
to the piece. The beginning of the ballet was what
they created last.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
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 potota, now you ready,
And then they start moving. I kept thinking about this
idea of carving space for each other.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
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
it is.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
To be close, carving space around each other.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Making space for each other, then moving within.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
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 didn't want it to look like choreography that we've
seen before with men and women. So what are different
(37:43):
ways that they can be connected? Well, grab our 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.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Watching it, I got shivers and 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.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
We don't see women being tender with each other in ballet.
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.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
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? And then I wanted them
to end in some sort of partnered image. There's this
(39:22):
balancing piece. Actually it's in Midsummer Night's Dream. There's this
beautiful patada, beautiful PoTA the second act of the divertse
small patata, and it ends so slowly and suspended, and
it kind of moves into this beautiful lift that kind
of leaves you just completely breathless, and I wanted that
(39:43):
for them. They walk to the back and she does
a point and it remy kind of pulls back on her.
They're holding each other's weight. I wanted it to be
slow and to kind of go into slow, suspended, partnered
(40:09):
moment where they're working together.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
The music fades until it's gone. They still move in
the silence, slowing.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
And then it kind of fizzles into this like last
moment of carving space together.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
When I watch the piece, it's like I 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.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
And now there's like a whole new of young people
who are just like out Jill, feeling great and I
love that. But Ballet hasn't changed. 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
(41:17):
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 turn that part of us off.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
The quote unquote real world. The Turning is 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
(42:41):
Crisa is our assistant producer. Andrea Assuage is our digital producer.
Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. You can learn about
Adriana's continued work to showcase LGBTQ plus artists and stories
in ballet at Queerdeballet dot com. Special thanks to Sierra
(43:02):
Armstrong and Remy Young, who danced and adrianas 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 jog Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rococo
(43:23):
Punch at Katrina Norvel and Niki 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 for listening.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.