Breaking with Convention

Historically, ballet has been defined by its strict gender codes and hierarchy of roles. The classical pas de deux is danced by a man and a woman, the male danseur wears flat ballet shoes and the female ballerina goes up on pointe. While there are exceptions to these rules, for example, the dancing donkey in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream is performed by a male artist on pointe, ballet is for the most part rigid in its characterisation of the feminine and masculine. Yet from ballet’s earliest days, artists have bent and blurred those lines. Male dancers once performed female roles in the 17th century French court, and contemporary artists continue to reimagine the possibilities of who may rise en pointe.

Since the Romantic ballets of the nineteenth century, where the fetishisation of the female ballerina began to emerge, ballet has evolved from its origins as a male-dominated art form. The ballerina has become the central figure, her lightness and grace the epitome of femininity and the male artists who exist in this sphere are considered "feminine-by-proxy". It's a difficult double-edged sword that both ridicules and polices femininity but also celebrates it within the specific constraints of classical ballet. 

A visionary leader and creator, Sergei Diaghilev Ballet Russes’ transformed ballet forever. Diaghilev was one of the few openly gay men in early twentieth-century Europe and surrounded himself with a community of writers, artists and musicians, who not only shared radical ideas, but often, queer lives. In 1909, ballerina Tamara Karsavina commented that “Diaghilev had become overnight a leader of the Paris homosexual set”, a social circle that included Lucien Daudet, Reynaldo Hahn, Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau. In a world still hostile to difference, this comment no doubt prompted both admiration and unease.

In 1913 Vaslav Nijinsky (Diaghilev’s protégé and former lover) premiered Jeux for the Ballet Russes. Revolving around a game of tennis, the original concept from Diaghilev was to include three male characters in what Nijinsky recalled in his diary:

“The story of this ballet is about three young men making love to each other…  Jeux is the life of which Diaghilev dreamed. He wanted to have two boys as lovers. He often told me so, but I refused. Diaghilev wanted to make love to two boys at the same time, and wanted these boys to make love to him. In the ballet, the two girls represent the two boys and the young man is Diaghilev. I changed the characters, as love between three men could not be represented on the stage.”

Jeux stands as an early testament to ballet’s enduring paradox: a space of both constraint and liberation, where queer desire was coded, concealed, yet always present.

In 1965, choreographer Rudi van Dantzig caused controversy with his one-act ballet, Monument for a Dead Boy. Performed by the Dutch National Ballet. Monument told the story of a young boy struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality. Tender, tragic, and unflinchingly honest, it portrayed same-sex love with humanity and care, while depicting heterosexual love through a lens of violence; a radical inversion of cultural norms at the time.  Originally danced by van Dantzig’s partner, Toer van Schayk, the role would go on to be performed by international ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev in 1968, bringing both van Dantzig and the Dutch National Ballet worldwide recognition. The work provoked scandal and acclaim in equal measure, revealing both society’s discomfort and the power of ballet to tell difficult truths. Monument for a Dead Boy became a turning point in the visibility of queer stories on the classical stage.

Because ballet has been cast as a ‘feminine’ art form, and the men that participate are then stigmatised as effeminate, the queer connotations in ballet are often portrayed within the male-presenting sphere. Homosexual men are more visible in ballet, while lesbian and queer women’s stories and identities have historically been overlooked, both on stage and off. The 1831 opera Robert le Diable includes the sexually charged dance, The Ballet of the Nuns, where deceased nuns who have violated their vows rise from their graves to seduce Robert le Diable, shedding their habits and engaging in bacchanalian behaviour. However, it is fair to see this portrayal as something created for the male gaze rather than a true representation of queer women in ballet.

In the last twenty years, choreographers have been working to disrupt the traditional conventions of ballet; genderqueer trans choreographer Katy Pyle created the company Ballez for this very reason. In 2013, Pyle premiered The Firebird, a Ballez, a contemporary reimagining of Michel Fokine’s 1910 ballet, Firebird. Pyle’s version switches up the gender and sexualities of the characters and subverts any stuffy ballet conventions with parody and protest.

Choreographer Deborah Lohse’s 2011 duet, Ineffable, plays into traditional ballet structure with a classical pas de deux to depict a wedding ceremony; only in this instance, it is the wedding of two women. Lohse also riffs on the role of the audience with Ineffable, inviting them in and breaking down the invisible barriers between spectator and performer; a fitting metaphor in this instance, dissolving barriers that contribute to the othering of LGBTIQA+ individuals in society. 

Ballet’s language has been built upon the gender binary, at times to the point of exclusion. Yet in recent years, artists and institutions around the world have begun to expand that vocabulary, embracing gender diversity as an essential part of the art form’s future.

A pioneer in the trans community, Sean Dorsey is recognised as the United States’ first acclaimed transgender modern dance choreographer. Highly awarded for his work, Dorsey founded his company, Sean Dorsey Dance in 2004, producing his own work alongside other trans artists and offering inclusive dance workshops for people across the spectrum of gender and ability. In 2019, Dorsey was the first openly transgender person on the cover of Dance Magazine, a pivotal moment of visibility and recognition for trans artistry on the global stage. 

In 2013, the Royal Academy of Dance changed its almost century-old rules that required dancers to take exams according to their sex assigned at birth. In 2015 Sophie Rebecca became the first openly trans dancer to complete the RAD exams, paving the way for others to follow.

Meanwhile, Chase Johnsey, formerly of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and the English National Ballet, broke boundaries as the first male dancer to perform within a female ensemble at a major ballet company. Identifying as genderfluid, Johnsey’s artistry continues to challenge the assumptions that ballet’s grace and power are assigned at birth.

Perhaps one of the most thrilling twists in recent ballet history is Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. The British choreographer reimagined one of ballet’s most recognisable stories through a queer lens, replacing the female corps de ballet of swans with an all-male ensemble. The queer undertones of Prince Siegfried as he grapples with his desire for freedom and his love for the cursed swan are emphasised by the striking costumes inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, while controversial at its premiere in 1995, went on to be the longest-running ballet on both Broadway and London’s West End, winning three Tony Awards and earning a place in cultural history.

More recent works that are reframing classical technique as a vehicle for truth-telling include Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s 2020 narrative ballet, Frida, about bisexual artist Frida Kahlo and Oscar, Christopher Wheeldon’s 'big, gay, ballet' that focuses on infamous writer Oscar Wilde, whose sexuality saw him convicted for crimes of ‘gross indecency’ in 1895.

While the ballet world is slowly moving beyond its rigid constraints of how bodies, genders and sexualities have been portrayed for centuries, this new era of expansive exploration continues to unfold, bringing new stories and perspectives of the human experience to the stage. Each new work builds upon centuries of tradition, unveiling hidden truths and influences, and reminding us that queerness has never been outside ballet’s frame, only waiting to step fully into the light.