Gay ballet

Queer the Ballet is working to make mainstream visibility for all LGBTQ+ artists a priority in the ballet sphere. Through live performances, groundbreaking dance on film, and education, Queer the Ballet is creating diverse queer representation and evolving ballet’s future. For all its pageantry, delicacy, and ostensibly queer-friendly elements, ballet--be it in the setting of ABT or Joffrey Ballet School, which Hill attends--can also be a tradition-bound.

are male ballet dancers called ballerinas

“It’s nothing more than any ballet where a straight couple performs; it is two human beings illustrating love and intimacy.” While there is a strong community for gay men in ballet, dancer and choreographer Adriana Pierce explains that queer dancers of marginalized genders have much less visibility. Choreographed by Christopher Rudd, the piece will make its debut this evening, opening ABT’s virtual season with three other world premieres by Gemma Bond, Darrell Grand Moultrie, and Pam.

There are plenty of men in ballet who aren’t gay, and I can do the same roles that they are doing. Ballet might not make you gay, but it attracts more gay men (and boys) than many other professions because homosexuality is so easily accepted. Pride is all about being who you are and loving who you want. But what about the art forms of opera and ballet?

The vast majority of the classical repertoire originates from a period in which there was no room for the variety of sexual orientations and gender identities that exists in our world.

After all, the classical repertoire mainly showcases the experiences of more traditional heterosexual couples. Yet that is not the whole story. Opera and ballet are, after all, art forms that have to be brought to life again and again. Unlike paintings or sculptures, opera and ballet always provide room for new visions and interpretations.

Indeed, that is what keeps these art forms alive. There are countless examples of operas and ballets in which directors and choreographers have chosen to include new perspectives in classical works. Dutch National Opera director Stefan Herheim, for example, incorporated composer Tchaikovsky's struggles with his sexual orientation in his production of Pique Dame.

More radical is the version of Swan Lake created by British choreographer Matthew Bourne, in which the roles of the swans are performed by male dancers and the work deals with the homosexual awakening of Prince Siegfried. This version was a hit on London's West End and on Broadway. When it comes to gender, opera is a special case.

In the iron repertoire, there are plenty of trouser roles, in which female singers often mezzo-sopranos sing roles of male characters almost always young men. Sometimes this is because a role was originally written for a castrato, a voice type that fortunately no longer exists, but just as often it was a conscious choice during the creation. But a conscious choice does not automatically mean that gender becomes a theme in operas with trouser roles.

In Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro , for instance, one cannot say that with the character of the irascible adolescent Cherubino, sung by a mezzo-soprano, gender identity enters the opera. Cherubino is primarily a young man who develops along masculine lines. The fact that the role is sung by a woman falls under the heading of 'suspension of disbelief'. In ballet, something like a trouser role would be unthinkable.

No other art form has such a hierarchical structure as ballet. In ballet companies, the dancer's table is still divided into various ranks, and within those ranks, into women and men. Gender is also linked to a whole gender-specific movement language in ballet. Women dance on pointe, men do more jumps and a pas de deux is danced by a man and a woman. However, there are more and more choreographers who are pushing these limits.

A pioneer in this field is Hans van Manen, who, already in , created Metaforen , a choreography with a male duet and a female duet. The duet can be performed by a man and a woman, two men or two women. In opera, the first queer character appears in Alban Berg's Lulu in The fact that she is a lesbian is not problematized. She just is, and her obsessive love is perhaps even more genuine than that of the men in the opera.

In the operas of the British composer Benjamin Britten , homosexuality, and in particular the social taboo on it, plays a major role. For example, in Billy Budd and Peter Grimes. In ballet, Rudi van Dantzig caused international furore in with his Monument for a Dead Boy , a psychodramatic ballet about the mental confusion of an adolescent trying to come to terms with his homosexual feelings.