Sleeping Beauty and the Beast, Ballez
photo: Theo Cote
La MaMa, 2016
Yesterday was World AIDS Day, and as my social media feeds filled with a moving collection of photos, poems, remembrances, mourning and resilience, I reflected on the ways in which theatre and dance artists have dealt with the epidemic onstage. I thought of the ferocity of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, and Joe Mantello’s equally fiery performance in the 2011 Broadway revival. I thought, of course, of the poetics of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America; of Prior and the Angel’s spinning dance of death in Ivo van Hove’s (otherwise quite awful) production at BAM, and of Denise Gough’s revelatory Harper wandering through Antarctica in Marianne Elliot’s more recent revival. I thought very much about a moment of collective defiance I witnessed at St. Mark’s Church, a space haunted (maybe literally?) by the ghosts of young artists lost—but more on this later in the month.
And I thought of Katy Pyle’s swans. A flock, a phalanx of gay swans, all elegant arms and bourrées, appearing in the midst of a thumping club scene. Saint-Saens’ familiar mournful cello melody cuts through the beats (by queer icon JD Samson), and the swans dance. As all swans must in ballet, they die. Some of them don’t get up. The gay swans’ dyke and femme friends tenderly carry their bodies offstage, and the thud of the club returns. A little later, this sequence repeats; and later, again, and again. Each time there are fewer swans. Each time fewer swans get back up.
The swans appear in the second half of Sleeping Beauty and the Beast, Pyle’s re-invention of Tchaikovsky’s beloved Sleeping Beauty for her company Ballez. (As the company’s website assures, “Ballez is just what it sounds like, it’s lesbians doing ballet. AND Ballez is not just lesbians, it’s all the people whom ballet has left out.”) I don’t know all that much about ballet history or form, so I am sure that I missed many of Pyle’s updates and upendings of canon, but her achievement with this work is still evident and remarkable on a number of levels. Foundationally, the company’s mission and very existence are radical and vital, celebrating and centering the queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming dancers who have been marginalized or rejected by the discipline’s rigid ideas about gender, and bodies in general. Here, these dancers are able to hold both the form and their identity in harmony, to express a full and raucous sexuality, to be silly, sincere, and skilled all at once. To see an entire company of such artists is thrilling.
The work, though, is not simply expanding representation, but deliberately situating the artists within a complex web of legacies. The first half, set in the 1890s (when Tchaikovsky’s ballet first premiered), sees Princess Aurora falling in love with a butch labor organizer and joining a female garment workers’ strike; Aurora’s sleep here becomes a collective die-in. In the second, she awakens into a club at the 1990s height of the AIDS crisis. (Both halves directly reference the history of the East Village/L.E.S., where the work was performed.) Connecting these struggles for justice and expressions of mutual care, and smuggling them into one of ballet’s most chestnutty chestnuts, Pyle and her collaborators assert a queer temporality that places gender outlaws at the center of a non-linear history. This in itself is a staging of justice, and an expression of care. It’s one of the most exciting formal engagements with ancestry and historical belonging I’ve witnessed; it’s also hilarious, moving, and sexy as hell. Mourn the dead—the gay swans, the dyke organizers, the genderqueer princxs—dance like hell for the living.